


Evidence of a Happier Future

by prince_dejah, RiddleBlack



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Eating Disorders, F/M, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, No actual suicide in the narrative but we talk about Stan's attempt, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-01-02 15:43:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21164102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prince_dejah/pseuds/prince_dejah, https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiddleBlack/pseuds/RiddleBlack
Summary: Eddie toyed with his bed sheets, refusing to look up at the group. “Losers stick together. Right?”“For life.” Bill nodded solemnly, then turned to face Richie. “We’re not letting anyone go by moving on. We all deserve a new chapter. A better ending.”In the year after the Losers' Club took on IT for the final time, each of them do their best to rewrite the endings they thought they were destined for.





	1. June

**Author's Note:**

> I truly do not know what to put here and it may be edited with my lovely co-writer. All I can think to say is that this will be updated as we go because we are going to ride this hyperfixation train as long as we can, so feel free to come along for the ride~!

******

_“The sun kept on slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible.”_

-Carol Rifka Brunt, “Tell the Wolves I’m Home”

******

“I just don’t know how I feel about the bodice.”

“Well, we can add a belt. Otherwise you’ll need to have it done as a custom—”

Eddie Kaspbrak’s eyes slowly twitched open, reluctant to pull himself from the comforting darkness. Everything was so fucking blurry and bright and for a brief moment, he wondered if his mother’s images of Heaven being a perfect, clean and gleaming white light were true. But that thought was soon pushed aside because even if he wasn’t sure how much he believed in God, he doubted that if He did exist, He would greet His followers with _Say Yes To The Dress _reruns.

As he blinked, the image before him began to clear. The room he was situated in was more beige than white, even if the light pouring in from the nearby windows gave it a cleaner color. Machines beeped all around him, though none managed to be loud enough to drown out the sound of a young bride weeping over the decision she had to make between a mermaid or a princess silhouette from the TV mounted at the ceiling. Turning ever so slightly to the left, he noted a heart rate monitor above his head, sounding the regular rhythm of his primary organ, continuing to beat against all the fucking odds—

“Fuck.” His voice cracked, rasping like it was crawling out of his throat with the effort of a man running a marathon. Only then did he become aware of the pain. A groan worked its way out more easily than the curse had, practically falling from his lips as he struggled to move. His chest burned. His whole torso burned. He felt like his body was being held together with hot glue and hope, and as the events leading up to his present arrangement slowly returned, he wondered how true that consideration was. Hands began to twitch in search of a nurse call button, relying on muscle memory from the dozens of times his mother checked him into the hospital for any number of ailments. When he didn’t immediately feel one beneath his fingertips, he turned to his other side to look for it. He froze.

It wasn’t the worst state he had ever seen Richie in. If he had never forgotten the man, several images would have fought for the spot of number one. The time he had insisted he could cartwheel along the railroad tracks and caught his finger under one of the bars, causing him to slam his face against the rusty steel and knock out one of his teeth. When he had tried to copy the actions of Kevin McAllister in _Home Alone _and somehow managed to light his own hair on fire. The night he’d shown up at his house on what was supposed to be a school dance, claiming that he just got bored and wanted to bail, but Eddie could see the redness around his eyes and had heard the rumors about graffiti going up in the girl’s bathroom and didn’t need specifics to know that the right thing to do was to pretend he was oblivious and let his best friend inside.

But none of them came to mind. They were all swept away in favor of the last time he’d seen Richie. Covered in dirt and sewer sludge and sweat and blood, Eddie’s blood, smiling at him as if cracked glasses could hide the fact that he was breathing too fucking hard to just be out of breath. The dirt was gone, as was the sewer sludge and blood. His glasses were still broken and threatened to slip down his nose as he slept. His chin was tucked to his chest and his arms were crossed, as if prepared to judge and comment on anything he woke up to. He was still sweaty, something that Eddie would have snorted at it he didn’t feel like his chest would cave in at the mere idea of it, and the stubble he had kind of grown used to seeing had darkened into not-quite-a-beard.

He wondered if Richie could even _grow_ a beard. A memory of their teen years formed, in which Stan had informed them that his parents had bought him a shaving kit for his fifteenth birthday, as he had started to grow “facial hair”. The facial hair in question had been little more than a few wisps along his upper lip, but it was there just the same. It had roused something of a competitive pubescent streak in the boys of the Losers’ Club, leading Richie to claim that he shaved his entire face every morning before school and the others just didn’t notice because he had gotten so good at not cutting himself. Eddie knew damn well that that had been a lie and the two had reached a point of wrestling over it until Richie threatened to give him a wet willy and they’d broken it up.

Absently, Eddie’s hand crept away from his side towards Richie’s face. His plan had been to brush his knuckles against it, a gentle request to join him in the waking world. Instead, his lack of coordination jammed his fingers to his nose, causing Richie to snort and sit up abruptly, sleepy eyes wide as his brain tried to catch up with his senses.

“Shit, what—” Richie’s arms instinctively uncrossed, only to go still at the sight of him. “Eddie.”

For a moment, he was back under the Neibolt house. Everything wet and heavy with the stench of sewage and Eddie can see the horror in Richie’s eyes as a spider leg the size of a tree branch pierces through his chest. The miserable agony of the injury is only rivaled by the whisper of his name, as if saying it would somehow make matters worse. But now the fear was replaced with something else, a different feeling that brought tears to Richie’s eyes and Eddie knew it wasn’t self-centered of him to identify it as relief.

The tears finally fell as Richie blinked. He didn’t bother to wipe them away, his hands too preoccupied with the task of not vibrating like a fucking caffeine addict as he reached out to cup Eddie’s face. Eddie remained still, ignoring all the possibilities of grime and disease beneath Richie’s fingers and allowing him to hold his head like a trophy. Neither of them spoke for a minute, letting machine beeps and TLC commercials fill the void. Eddie opened his mouth, ready to reassure Richie, ready to say anything that would usher the tears away. But then Richie surged forward and wrapped his arms tightly around his shoulders. Instantly, the comforting words were replaced with pained curses and his best attempts to wiggle himself from his grasp.

“Fuck—” He wheezed, “Rich, let go of me.”

Richie didn’t release him. “You almost died, asshole.”

“Exactly, moron. I almost died because of a hole in my chest and now you’re squeezing where the fucking hole is.” He didn’t care how dry his throat was in that moment or how hard it was to gasp out his thoughts. The dickhead wasn’t listening—

“You can’t even be thankful that I carried you out of that goddamn house by myself. Not even Ben with his fucking John Cena muscles helped me out, and the first thing you do when you wake up after I’ve been by your side like a coma wife in a Lifetime movie is bust my balls for daring to be happy that you didn’t choke,” He had released Eddie by then, but that wasn’t the point, “You can be such a little bitch—”

“Are you kidding me?”

Richie turned to look over his shoulder and Eddie followed his gaze. In the doorway of his hospital room stood Beverly, a Styrofoam cup in each hand. Just behind her were Ben, Mike, and Bill, the trio trying to lean around one another to get a better look into the room without stepping in. It was unclear of if they were afraid to interrupt the apparent argument unfolding, or if they were hesitant to ask Beverly to step aside.

“You just woke up after major thoracic surgery and you’re already at each other’s throats?” She stepped further into the room and set the cups on the pseudo-nightstand. Taking that as the all clear to follow, the other present members of the Losers’ Club came in behind her, situating themselves around Eddie’s hospital bed. Richie leaned back in his seat and recrossed his arms.

“Well his throat didn’t get fucked up, so I figured, why not?” He picked up one of the cups and took a sip. He grimaced, “Bev, this is shit.”

She didn’t bother to reply. Moving to Eddie’s side, she rested a gentle hand on his shoulder and smiled down at him. “How’re you feeling?”

“Fine. I guess. As fine as I can be after… after that.” He could see sadness flash through Bev’s eyes, so he looked back down at his hands. Unlike most people, Eddie found comfort in seeing a medical bracelet around his wrist. It meant he was getting medicine and medicine was supposed to heal. That was something, right?

“Good.” She murmured. He felt her bend down to kiss the top of his head and a hint of a smile tugged at his lips. When they were younger, he’d always insisted that Beverly should reign in her affectionate nature, claiming that she didn’t know how many diseases radiated off the skin of unwashed teens. But he couldn’t fault her for it now. Not when he was just back off the brink of death. Instead, he let his eyes drift around the room. He took in the image of his friends sitting before him, each wearing a look of utter relief that simultaneously set him on edge and soothed his fear. Because in spite of the hole in his chest and the needles in his arms, he was alive. _They _were alive. And for the most part, they were together. In that moment, he couldn’t think to want more.

******

_“I haven’t told anyone, just like we promised. Have you?”_

-Mitski, “Old Friend”

******

_He remembered fire. Hot, burning light bursting up against the darkness of It’s lair. Richie didn’t know where it came from, only that it came with some unholy groaning, bursting out over the rumble of flames. He was staring up at the ceiling of the cave, the shadows of the rock climbing up and up until he couldn’t see where the top of everything sloped._

_"Rich? Hey, Rich. Wake up! Hey!”_

_His eyes snapped down and Eddie was on top of him. He had his hands on his shoulders and he was shaking him awake like he’d been just taking a nap. He didn’t answer but having his eyes open seemed to be enough. Eddie’s lips spread into a smile wide enough to loosen the tape on his bandaged cheek._

_"Yeah! Yeah, there he is, buddy!” He couldn’t remember a time that Eddie had ever called him ‘buddy’. Was that something that adult Eddie did? “Hey, Richie! Listen, I think I got him, man.” Eddie turned to look at something over his shoulder. Richie was too dazed to move. When Eddie looked back at him, his smile was even wider, bigger than he’d seen the whole fucking time they’d been in Derry. “I think I killed it—”_

_The sound made him think of the clubhouse. As they got older and Ben grew more skilled with tools and blueprints, he’d saved up all the money from his summer job after their sophomore year to buy a nail gun. It had a little level attached on the end of it and Richie had always insisted it was a perfect way to give one’s self a Prince Albert piercing. After that, any renovations that were made to the clubhouse came with the background noise of Debbie Gibson and the repetitive pounding of a nail whistling from the gun and into a wooden support. He wouldn’t have imagined a giant clown’s spider leg bursting through a man’s torso would have sounded so similar, but there were a lot of things that had happened over the last forty-eight hours that Richie wouldn’t have imagined._

_He gasped, his jaw dropping as blood spilled onto his chest. He watched as Eddie’s shaky hands instinctively rose to grab the end of the limb. Like he could somehow pull it out, a little splinter that could be solved with some disinfectant and a Band-Aid. Richie willed himself to look away from the wound and found Eddie’s face. If he thought his heart had stopped when he watched the leg pierce through, he was wrong. He was certain he felt all beating cease and the blood flow still as he met Eddie’s gaze. The shock rapidly dissipated into pain; his brow pinched as his eyes screwed shut. Opening his mouth, blood poured from his lips and he croaked out his name._

_"Richie…”_

_He wished that fucking clown had put some more effort behind that swing. Maybe then It would have gotten them both at once. He wouldn’t have had to see Eddie, hear him say that, if It had._

_“Eddie—”_

“Rich?”

Richie startled, looking up to discern who had roused him from his thoughts. Mike was staring at him the most intensely, but the others were starting to shift their attentions over to him. Even Eddie was doing his best to lean around Beverly to see him and he knew if he didn’t wave the matter off, there would be questions.

“Sorry. Spaced. What’s up?” He rested his chin back in his hand and leaned on the chair’s armrest. He felt his joints ache with the position change and let his thoughts move away from his memories and into his hatred of hospital chairs. They fucking sucked. Even if he hadn’t been essentially living in one for the past three days, he was sure his feelings would be the same.

“Just updating Eddie on what happened,” Ben said, nodding towards the bed, “How he saved you.”

Richie rolled his eyes. “Don’t give him a big head. It’ll look so weird on his tiny body.”

"And how you saved him.” Mike added.

“On second thought, go on.”

Eddie laughed. Or rather, he huffed out a breath that came along with the smallest lift of his lips and Richie supposed that was the closest you could get to laughing after having a hole put through your torso. Said man was examining his own bed chart, flipping back and forth through the pages, and Richie was sure that out of any of them, Eddie would be the one to actually know what all that medical jargon meant. All Richie had understood from the E.R. doctor’s explanation were the words “severe trauma” and “significant blood loss”.

“Anyway,” Bill continued, rolling his eyes, “So you threw the spear at It, as you know. It dropped Rich, and you went to check on him. He said he pulled you down to him as It pierced your back and… well, I think you remember the rest.”

Eddie nodded vaguely and Richie hoped the memories existed only in broad strokes. The wound being stopped up <strike>by Richie pressing his hands into the hole and pleading for him to stay awake.</strike> Pennywise being stopped and ultimately destroyed by the Losers <strike>including an instant in which, enraged, Richie ripped the leg that had stabbed Eddie clean out of It’s body</strike>. Being carried out of the Neibolt house in Richie’s arms, <strike>who dropped him only twice,</strike> and brought to the nearest hospital to be cared for <strike>all the while Richie stood by and reassured him that he would be fine as tears poured down his face</strike>.

“It’s damn good luck that Richie moved you,” Mike interjected, “The doctor said that if your injury had been any closer to your heart, you probably would have…” He didn’t finish and no one tried to do so for him. Everyone seemed to be looking at Eddie, simply relieved about how the events of their return to Derry had transpired. However, Richie could feel someone’s eyes on him. Leaning back a bit in his seat, he met Beverly’s gaze. Pain lingered there, as it seemed to behind all their eyes nowadays, but there was also a sense of understanding. He didn’t have to guess that she knew. She’d seen him in the Dead Lights. She knew what he saw. He gave the most minute shake of his head, a silent plead to not push. Reluctantly, her eyes slid from him and started to return to Eddie, only to be pulled to her purse where some vaguely familiar synth-beats pulsed. She went to dig out her phone.

Bill raised an eyebrow. “Is that New Kids On The Block?” Ben perked up in his seat.

Beverly’s expression didn’t change, but Richie could see a touch of color rising to her cheeks. “Yeah. It’s my favorite song.” She drifted her focus over to Ben and a look of recognition momentarily passed over her face. She opened her mouth as if to say something but appeared to rethink it and looked back at her phone screen. “Shit, I actually have to take this. Excuse me,” She slid her thumb across the screen and headed out into the hall, “Hello, Beverly Marsh speaking—”

Richie watched her go and pointed his thumb in her direction. “What’s so important that she has to take a call _now_?”

Ben shot him a scolding look. “It’s probably her lawyer. She said she called her before she flew out, remember?”

Richie at least had the decency to look embarrassed. He forgot that life even existed outside of Derry. It was like the last several days had been everything he’d ever known. They had all seen Bev’s bruises when she arrived, and it didn’t take much to put everything together as memories of their past came back. A call from a lawyer shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

“Speaking of calls…” Mike grimaced, looking to Eddie apologetically, “We, uh… we weren’t able to get in touch with Myra. We couldn’t find your phone with any of your things. There’s a good chance it’s somewhere in the sewers.”

Despite the discomfort starting to brew in his gut, Richie did his best to keep his face unchanged. Eddie’s wife hadn’t come up since he pointed her out as an example of the man’s bravery before they properly entered It’s lair and, if he were honest, her lack of presence wasn’t something he really concerned himself with when he was holding vigil at Eddie’s bedside.

Eddie swallowed and set his chart aside. “It’s alright,” He assured, “It’s probably better that you didn’t call her. She would just freak out if she saw me like this and that would just make everything… worse. I’ll call her in a while. Fill her in. Not on everything, of course.”

Was it fucked up that Richie was just a little pleased by Eddie’s hesitance to see his own wife? Yes. Would that stop him from thinking it? Hell no. Instead he just nodded along with the rest of the group and let the conversation easily drift away from the source of his jealousy.

“So, I guess Bev’s going back to Chicago,” Eddie murmured, seemingly just as eager to change the subject, “What about you guys?”

“Well,” Ben shifted in his seat, as if hesitant to provide an answer, “I think I’m going to go with Beverly. She said she’s nervous to go back to get the rest of her things on her own after getting the papers served. I know she’s trying to file a restraining order, but I’m not sure if it’ll take in time or if it’ll even be followed.”

Richie hummed in acknowledgement. He doubted any of them were really surprised. Ben had always held a candle for Beverly and his yearbook page token was enough to drive the point home. He would have been more thrown off if Ben had said that he was just going to go back to Boston alone.

“Wait. You _think _you are?” Mike asked, “Plans aren’t concrete?”

“No. Uh… I still have to talk to her. I just don’t want her to feel like she has to go back to something like that alone after facing all of this with so much support, you know?” He shrugged, as if his personal consideration of chivalry was no big deal. However, as Beverly reentered the room, he was quick to move the focus from himself. “What about you?

After taking a moment to glance between Bev and Ben, Mike answered. “Actually, Bill and I are going to head to Georgia. We wanted to fill Stan in a little better before he’s discharged.”

It felt as though the whole room quieted at the mention of Stan, even the television and air conditioning unit settling down out of respect for their friend. After the fortune cookie scare and Beverly’s call to Atlanta, the Losers had been devastated to learn that Stan had tried to take his own life. It wasn’t explicitly stated, but everyone knew it was because he was so afraid. His wife – Patty, they would come to learn – agreed to call them if anything changed. Oddly enough, as the group was doing their best to fill out what they could of Eddie’s admittance forms, Patty called them back. Stan had just woken up from his medication-induced coma. Level of recovery and severity of brain damage was still uncertain. But he was awake. He was awake and alive and that was fucking _everything _after what they’d been through.

Bill nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I got us tickets to fly out tomorrow afternoon. Figured we would find a hotel when we got there and stick with him for a little bit. Keep everyone in the loop without making Stan’s wife have to call us all the time.”

“Was Patty okay with that?” asked Ben.

Mike spoke up. “As long as we didn’t impede his recovery process, yeah. His family is there too, so we’re going to try and keep out of the way when he needs time.”

“And what about Audra?”

The group turned their attention to Beverly. She was intent on Bill, brows raised. He returned her expression with a confused one of his own.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” She said, “Was she okay with you extending your trip to go down to Atlanta?”

Bill shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, I didn’t tell her how long I’d be gone, so it doubt it would make a difference to her.”

Even Richie had to grimace at that answer. Bill looked between each of his friends, perplexed by their apparent discomfort. “What?”

“You didn’t tell your wife how long you’d be gone?” Ben asked.

“No! What, did you guys?” He gestured vaguely in Eddie and Beverly’s direction, only to immediately put his hand down when he considered the implications of the latter. Beverly pursed her lips but didn’t bother to give him an answer.

“I gave Myra a fake itinerary,” Eddie admitted, “And told her there was a chance that the trip would be extended.”

Richie nearly snorted. Of course he gave his wife a completely fake schedule for a made-up work trip. Even his lies were anal. Wait, don’t even go down that road—

Beverly interrupted his line of thought. “You should probably fill her in on your plan, Bill. Especially if she hasn’t heard from you.”

Bill looked ready to point something out, something Richie suspected to be regarding the weird sexual energy the two of them had been bouncing around the whole trip, but he neglected to do so, instead pulling out his phone and starting to text. Satisfied, Beverly looked to Richie.

“And you?”

“Me?” He didn’t know why he was surprised by the question. After all, everyone else seemed to have an immediate plan in place. Surely, he had something on as well. But the thought of returning to L.A., to his studio apartment, to the open windows and blaring rock music that served to mask how fucking lonely he felt wasn’t appealing in the slightest. So Richie elected to do what he did in any situation he didn’t have an immediate plan for: keep talking until his mouth came up with something that his brain couldn’t.

“Somebody has to be here to make sure Eddie doesn’t go postal on any of these nurses for forgetting to, like, filter his water or some shit. I don’t have the face to be one of those crying interviewees on _Dateline_.”

Eddie scrunched up his features, prepared to yell at Richie, and he was just beginning to think that he looked kind of like one of those dogs with the smushed in faces when he did that (he supposed that was one of the impacts of aging) when Mike interrupted.

“That’s actually not a bad idea, Rich. I’m sure Eddie could use the help getting back on his feet.”

“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, thank you very much,” Eddie frowned. In defiance, he went to cross his arms, only to wince and let them drop back to his sides. The other Losers glanced knowingly about themselves. Eddie’s issues with medical care, especially when at the hands of loved ones, wasn’t exactly a secret. They remembered him informing them a while after they’d defeated It the first time that he had learned that his medicine was little more than sugar capsules. Everyone tried to make light of it then, joking that they must have made him super healthy just for taking medications when he didn’t need them or, in Richie’s case, claiming that his blood sugar must be through the fucking roof if he was taking a pharmacy’s worth of sugar pills every day. But seeing how Eddie described his present life, it was easy to see how deeply the discomfort with healing ran.

“You can’t even touch your chest without moaning, dipshit. I don’t see how you would even make it out of the hospital.” Richie chided. Ben gave him a small smile as everyone else gave a vague nod in agreement.

_I’d like to thank shitty hospital coffee for keeping my motor mouth running and my brain shut the fuck off, as well as Eddie “Spaghetti” Kaspbrak for being a stubborn little bitch. _Richie no longer had to think of a means to justify staying with Eddie. He’d lost him for twenty-seven years, regardless of if he was aware of it, and he wasn’t about to pat him on the back and wish him an easy flight back to the Big Apple. And, deep down, he knew there were other reasons he wanted to stay. Reasons he’d buried deep when he was thirteen and intended to keep down if he had anything to say about it.

Eddie sighed in defeat and managed as pitiful a shrug as he could muster. “Alright, fine. Whatever.” He picked up his chart and began to scan it once more (for the sake of something to do, Richie supposed), “I should be set to get out of here by tomorrow anyway.”

With that, the group was allowed a minor lull, drifting off into their own little worlds. Bill continued to text, Ben and Bev were engaged in some near-silent conversation, and Mike appeared to be lost in thought, his hand absently rubbing at his chin. Richie found himself watching Eddie mouth the words he was reading on the chart. Reading lips wasn’t exactly a skill he had ever tried to pick up, but he figured there was never a bad time to practice. After all, he remembered doing it a lot when they were younger. Eddie always talked so fast and enunciated so passionately, that even when Richie wasn’t listening, he could usually know exactly what he was saying. Plus, his lips were just nice to— wait, whoa, whoa, no—!

Richie willed his gaze to the floor. Something churned in his stomach. He needed to think about anything else. Anything in the world. Anything that wasn’t how clearly he could tell Eddie was reading the words “admitting diagnosis”.

“So, uh…” Richie cleared his throat. Everyone looked up, expecting some wise crack about sponge baths and dick sizes. “What happens now?”

No one immediately spoke. The only indication that he had been heard came from Eddie no longer flipping his chart pages.

“Well, Mike and Bill are going to Atlanta—” Ben started.

Richie cut him off. “I know all of that. What I meant was… how do I say it?” He sighed before making a vague gesture with his hands. “We were best friends for fucking forever, then suddenly we forgot each other for like thirty goddamn years, then reunited only to be further traumatized by that clown. Now we’re like… done? That’s it? Are we just supposed to move on with our lives?”

The question hung in the air for a moment. It was a fair point.

Bill was the first to speak. “I don’t think I’m going to be forgetting any of this again. No matter where I am, no matter where we are. I think whatever we did, it’s going to work. We didn’t just send It away; we destroyed it. We smashed it’s heart in our hands and brought it’s whole lair down. Whatever we did has already made a difference. The Neibolt House is gone and kids don’t have to be scared of that place anymore. That manifestation of It no longer exists. What we’ve done… it matters.”

Ben nodded in agreement. “As much as I’d like to forget seeing that shit crawl out of the fortune cookies and that clown carving into my stomach, I think Bill’s right. Everything we did worked out in the end.”

“Honestly, I’m a little scared to leave Derry,” Mike admitted. His voice was soft and he stared down at his hands. Absently, his thumb brushed over his palm, pressing down at where their shared scars had once been. “My whole life has been here, and I never had the luxury, the trauma – whatever you want to call it – of forgetting.”

“But moving on doesn’t have to mean forgetting,” Beverly assured, shifting closer to Mike and resting a hand on his shoulder, “It just means we’ll know how much better things are now.”

Eddie toyed with his bed sheets, refusing to look up at the group. “Losers stick together. Right?”

“For life.” Bill nodded solemnly, then turned to face Richie. “We’re not letting anyone go by moving on. We all deserve a new chapter. A better ending.”

Richie felt his eyes start to get watery and he cursed under his breath. He did his best to subtly wipe his nose with the back of his hand, but he knew the effort was futile. How many fucking times was he going to cry today? “Alright, don’t get sappy on me, Billiam. I just wanted to make sure you all weren’t going to skip out on our group therapy.”

Eddie let out an abrupt giggle, more open and genuine than anything he’d let out since his arrival in Derry. It seemed to pull the laugher from everyone else’s throats, lifting the weight of their fear from their shoulders. An unknown lightness remained, floating about them as they spoke casually about flight times, hotel reservations, and whose new home city the group should visit first. Richie felt like he could finally breathe. All of the fear and worry and anxiety that had been with him as long as he could remember was still there, deep in his gut, but it felt meaningless in the face of three simple truths:

  1. He remembered what had happened to him.
  2. In spite of it, he would be alright.
  3. They would all be alright.

******

_“We are all children searching for love.”_

-Leonard Nimoy

******

As he felt fingers tug at the bandages, inching closer and closer to skin-to-skin contact, it took everything in Eddie not to flinch and beg Richie to just let him do it himself. That was part of the negotiations he’d made with his attending doctor, that if he wanted to be discharged and not come back to a hospital every two days to have his bandages redressed, he needed to have someone there to help him. The possibility of hiring a nurse came to mind, but Richie pointed out that it was unlikely that he’d be able to hire a proper nurse until he got back to New York and his flight wasn’t for another three days (it fit well within the parameters of the “itinerary” he had given Myra and he fully intended to take all the extra time he could to think of an explanation she would believe). He thought of asking any of their friends to stay, whispering in their ears during goodbyes that he would pay them a nurse’s salary to help him out if they just put off their flights a couple more days, for the love of God, don’t leave him with Nurse Richie. Said man asserted that he had every right to be offended, but he would be the bigger man and simply chalk Eddie’s fear up to medicinal paranoia. Or just having “short asshole syndrome”. Richie would have him know that he’d read all the pamphlets, watched several tutorials on Youtube, and had even practiced cleaning an injury he’d faked himself with some ketchup and cold cuts (Eddie had resisted the urge to claim that was insensitive to his nearly mortal wounding and instead just said that his practice sounded disgusting). Finding no other options, he allowed it and made sure to remind the doctor that he would be back right before his flight if he found Richie’s bedside manner to be subpar.

“Gonna’ get a little cold here, Eds.” He heard Richie say behind him, immediately followed by the feeling of the bathroom’s open air hitting his previously wrapped skin.

_Don’t fucking think about the last time this place was properly cleaned. Don’t think about how underpaid the maids are or how they probably just swipe the mirror with Windex and wipe up any piss with the same rag they use to clean dust off the dresser—_

He expected Richie to wince or make a comment about seeing a silhouette of Jesus in his scar or some shit. Instead he heard a bottle of rubbing alcohol being opened and Richie whispering that the wound would probably sting. He was right. Eddie hissed, his shoulders tensing as the paper towel made contact with the tissue. The pain that radiated from his back was nothing compared to the initial injury, but it still didn’t feel great. He screwed his eyes shut against the burning sensation, only for another feeling to join it. Richie’s hand, the one that wasn’t rubbing away dried blood or pus, was squeezing his shoulder. His thumb ran up and down with each swipe of the towel and Eddie willed himself to focus on that movement. After several minutes, the stinging began to fade. Richie assured him he just needed to apply some ointment before they redressed, and it was all set.

“Doing great, man.” He said. Eddie finally looked up from his lap, ready to point out that he hadn’t done anything except sit on the edge of his bathtub like a kid being given a Band-Aid. He expected to meet Richie’s eyes in the mirror; they both would have rolled them and Richie would have probably poked Eddie’s injury hard enough to illicit an uncomfortable noise and he would say ‘that’s what your mom sounded like when we fucked for the first time’ or something equally stupid. But Richie wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were locked on his back, brows furrowed in utter concentration. He was even using the latex gloves Doctor Allan had urged him to get for treating the injury, the ones that Richie said were for hypochondriacs and people who liked to “play doctor” in the bedroom. Eddie didn’t speak, afraid that any noise would break his concentration. Soon enough, he set the container of ointment aside and retrieved a new set of bandages. Coaxing him to lift his arms as well as he could manage, Richie wrapped the gauze around his chest and back, checking with each cycle that it wasn’t too tight or loose. Once it was cinched, he tucked the pristine white cloth into itself and brushed his fingers along it, ensuring that there were no bumps or spots uncovered. Eddie waited for a playful slap to his shoulder, his sign to get up and thank Richie for his help and promise him that he didn’t need to do this again if he didn’t want to. But it never came.

He almost didn’t feel it. Hell, if he hadn’t been facing the mirror, he wondered if he would have even known it happened. Blue eyes closed and, so slowly, Eddie watched as Richie bent forward to press a kiss to his shoulder. When they reopened, their gazes locked. Neither moved for several moments. Finally, Eddie craned his neck to face Richie, trying not to cringe. The wound limited his mobility more than he’d expect and even just turning his head could be painful at times. Looking at Richie properly, he became aware of how fucking exhausted he looked, how deep the bags were under his eyes. He didn’t remember them being that bad at the hospital. Then again, maybe his glasses had obscured them, allowing him to hide sleepless nights behind caked dirt and dried blood. Gently, Eddie lifted a hand from the edge of the tub, his thumb coming to brush against Richie’s cheekbone.

“You should get some sleep.” He murmured. Even with his voice being as soft as it was, it still felt like it echoed through the tiny hotel bathroom.

“Probably.” The agreement came with a weak smile. Neither made any move to stand, to go to bed as suggested. Eddie watched Richie’s eyes shut and his face get closer to his, simultaneously in slow-motion and far, far too fast.

“What’re you doing?”

Richie froze, eyes opening once more. He was inches from Eddie, their foreheads nearly touching. The latter could almost feel his stubble brushing against his lips and he could hear his mother’s voice, telling him how tiny mites lived on things like eyelashes and facial hair and God knew how frequently men cleaned their beards.

“What do you mean?”

Eddie felt himself twitch back, just a little bit, and immediately Richie backed off. He nudged Eddie’s hand from his face. He dropped it into his lap, fingers itching to grab some hand sanitizer from his toiletry bag.

“Sorry. I thought we were…” Richie trailed off and vaguely gestured between them before dropping a hand into his hair, “I should— Christ, I’m sorry. You’re—we—fuck, I’m—”

Eddie shook his head. “It’s fine.”

“No, it isn’t. You’re hurt and I’m all on you and you didn’t ask for this and I just assumed—fuck—"

“I’m not gay, Rich.” He didn’t know why he felt the need to say so. It was obvious, right? Richie knew he wasn’t. Jesus, he was married. Of course he wasn’t.

A frown spread across the man’s face and his eyes fell back on Eddie. “What?”

“I’m not fucking gay. That’s what I said.” He went to cross his arms, only to grimace at the pain that came with the act. Why was he always doing that?

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Richie mirrored his action and Eddie wondered if he was mocking him or if he was trying to put more distance between them too. But what did he need distance for? He didn’t have the fucking scar tissue on his back, open and willing to accept all the germs that were just waiting for him to make a stupid move like—

_“—kissing a boy. That’s how he died, did you know that, Eddie? He became… involved, with another man. He got sick from it and died. It’s all over the news. All these young men dying because they’re getting into that lifestyle. Don’t let that happen to you, Eddie. Your immune system is so weak as it is—"_

“It means—”

“It means you’re not a fag, is that it?”

Eddie flinched at how easily Richie spit out the word. It was tossed around so frequently when they were young, usually by Bowers and his gang. But even with how often Richie threw around comments about his dick and jokes about fucking his friends’ mothers, Eddie had never heard him say that. “Not like that.”

“Then like what?” Richie asked, standing up and stepping away from the tub, “A fairy? The fuck do you want to say, Eddie?”

“I’m not saying that!”

“Then what _do _you want to say?”

What did he want to say? What could he tell Richie that wouldn’t lead him down a road of mockery and comments? Jokes about preferring to sleep with his mother over other men, jibes about how out of all the pills he took, none of them could make his dick hard enough to be with a woman, and why did he already have these ideas in his head without Richie even fucking saying them—

_“Sweetheart, it makes the blood sick. They kiss and the saliva enters the body and gets into the blood stream, making them sick until they can’t get better. It’s so sad, really. Some of them even only did it once, just to try something different, and that was all it took. Risks like that, something so dirty for the sake of excitement, are never worth it.”_

“It doesn’t fucking matter what I want to say. I’m not fucking gay, I’m not fucking a guy, and that’s all there is to it.”

Richie scoffed and turned back to face him, sending Eddie’s heart into his stomach. He’d never seen rage like that in his eyes. Beyond their time in Pennywise’s lair, he couldn’t remember ever seeing the man look so angry.

“If that’s all there is to it…” He mimicked, giving his imitation of Eddie a whiny inflection before tugging the latex glove from his hand and tossing it onto the floor, “Don’t know what I was thinking. My bad.”

“Rich—”

He refused to look at Eddie, rambling furiously as he collected the medical supplies he brought and tossed them haphazardly onto the vanity. “I mean, I should have known. Of course, the King of Clean isn’t a fucking fag. Why would he be? Gay men are so filthy, and you’re just goddamn perfect. A pure little angel, saving himself from the sinful homos by dousing himself in hand sanitizer every time he comes in contact with one.”

Eddie felt a knot form in his throat and struggled to swallow it down. “Fuck you.”

“Except don’t, because then you’ll catch queer.” Richie shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and Eddie noticed how red his face was. He couldn’t tell if it was from anger or shame. “Your back is done. Get a nurse to clean it next time.” Before he could say more, he was out of the bathroom and the hotel room door, letting it slam shut behind him. Eddie didn’t move, still balanced on the lip of the tub. The silence echoed. No heart monitor beeps, no excitable conversations, no daytime television blasting. For the first time since he woke up in the hospital, he was completely alone with his thoughts. The surprise didn’t come from this realization, but from where his mind drifted. He didn’t think about how gross the place was or how early he should leave for his flight or his mother or a spider leg trying to stop his heart. Instead he found himself replaying the image of Richie’s face, watching as the affection in his eyes faded so fast, morphing into utter misery. His best friend of his youth (of perhaps his life, given his minimal non-work socializing) had come out to him with the level of rage and ferocity he had used to launch those rocks at Henry Bowers and his friends almost thirty years ago. Richie threw that piece of himself at him, socked him with such a private revelation because Eddie had decided “not fucking gay” was better than “married”.

He almost wished he’d hit him with a rock instead.


	2. July

******

_“This city is so small. You could never murder anybody by mistake.”_

-June Jordan

******

With the memories that returned to stay came an unspoken realization: that after what happened, certain things were not to be discussed. Tidbits and twitches and quirks that came out of the woodwork that none of them tried to explain.

Audra noticed that Bill would not look in a mirror for too long. Every morning before he walked out the door, he would ask her if he looked alright and she would inevitably notice a glaring issue – a spot of stubble he’d completely missed while shaving or a bleach stain the size of his fist in the center of his shirt. At one point, she asked if he was even looking at himself when he got dressed, only for his eyes to go glassy as he refused to answer. She noticed it more and more whenever they went out. He would always squint to look through shop windows, even when the sun didn’t cast a glare, and he completely refused to try any clothing on in a fitting room. The most obvious factor had been with the bathroom he had attached to his office. She stopped in when Bill had been using their master bath, pausing at the sink to find that her eyes _weren’t _staring back at her, but an olive green wall, the paint before her a fresher color than that of the plaster surrounding where the mirror had once been. There was no good way to ask someone why they wouldn’t look at their reflection and even if she had, Audra suspected that she wouldn’t get an honest answer.

Ben had always been quite hands-on with his work. Even when his job in the building process was complete, he still liked to come out to sites and see how his designs were coming along. He was always friendly with the builders; he would ask about their other assignments, about their families, about what thoughts they had regarding his specifications on projects. Construction teams always tended to respect him, one of the few architects that had no problem joining them to overlook a skyscraper’s intended views or taking their suggestions into account over that of the big-wigs that were paying for the structure. There initially didn’t appear to be any change when he returned from his trip home; his work remained impressive and he stayed as involved with a wide variety of construction groups. But he began to make one continuous refusal: he would not enter any subfloors, in-progress or otherwise.

After their flight down to Atlanta, Mike realized that for the first time in twenty-seven years, he didn’t feel like something was buzzing beneath his skin. The silent, burning desire for something he couldn’t recognize faded away as soon as he felt the plane take off. Before their visit with Stan had even reached its end, he had booked a motel room in Virginia for less than a week away and made a list of everything he would need for a straight shot down from Maine. Remaining in Derry was no longer an option. As soon as he returned, he was on the road, no longer staying anywhere for more than a few days. He didn’t want to wake that sensation in his bones again.

None of them could stomach Chinese food anymore.

And Richie?

The flight to L.A. had been fine. He called his manager as he found himself storming out of the Holiday Inn and after Ravi had questioned him extensively about his disappearance and received zero answers for his efforts, he reluctantly booked the man a red eye flight out of PWM and Richie was lucky enough to spend the following ten hours alternating between reclining as best as he could with his business class leg room and downing as many rum and Cokes as the flight attendants would allow. He landed in California and gave jet lag the middle finger, slamming his head into the pillow hard enough to knock himself out until there was pounding on the front door of his apartment. Pressing the heel of his hand to his temple, he stumbled to the entrance and yanked it open. He didn’t even manage a greeting before Ravi shouldered his way in. The shorter man made his way to Richie’s kitchen, kicking aside his duffel bag from where he had tossed it upon his return and setting the Peet’s caddy on his counter, all without looking up from his phone screen.

“Nice to see you—” Richie started to say, only to be silenced by a sharp hiss.

“Don’t even start.” Setting his phone down on one of the few inches of counter-top that wasn’t covered in junk mail or unknown food stains, Ravi began to separate their breakfasts as he laid into his tirade. “You’re the reason I’m balding, Richie. Do you understand that? I’m one of the lucky few men in the world that wasn’t genetically predisposed to hair loss and now I’m losing handfuls every time I see you calling. You’ve pulled a lot of shit with me, but this last stunt is ridiculous.” He tossed a paper-wrapped egg sandwich his way and picked up his own coffee order to take a sip. “We got you the Orpheum. The fucking Orpheum Theater, Rich, and you blew it. Then you run off to goddamn Maine!? I didn’t hear from you for almost three weeks! TMZ and Buzzfeed think you’re on a bender! What is going on with you?”

Richie stared at the sandwich in his hands. The paper felt greasy and he could smell the bacon beneath the wrapping. He knew Ravi probably had a bit of a time finding a Peet’s that actually had a sandwich like this. For all the things he loved about Los Angeles, the city’s apparent obsession with annihilating all things unhealthy was not one of them. He set it back on the counter.

“I don’t know.”

He could see a vein threaten to burst at Ravi’s temple. “You don’t know?”

“I mean…” What the fuck was he supposed to say? _I realized I forgot the entirety of my childhood and had a full “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” style flashback moment in front of a sold-out audience because one of my childhood friends called me to say “Hey, man! Want to meet up in Derry to roll around in the sewers and kill an eldritch nightmare clown?”. Oh, and I found out my best friend tried to kill himself and the guy I forgot I was in love with since I was seven showed up FUCKING MARRIED and almost died trying to save me, only for me to fuck everything up by trying to kiss him in a shitty hotel room like an asshole—_ “I just had to go home for a while, man. Family emergency.”

Ravi raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “I thought your parents had died.”

“Yeah.” The answer didn’t need any follow-up. Not in Richie’s mind. Just because his parents were gone didn’t mean he didn’t have any family left. The Ritual of Chüd had shown him that.

Waiting a minute for more information and not receiving any, Ravi heaved a sigh. “Whatever. Don’t tell me. I don’t care. What I care about right now is damage control. I know you’re going to need your time to re-acclimate or whatever—”

“No.”

Ravi paused. “What?” Every time Richie came back from a major trip, he would claim he needed time to “re-situate himself” into his life before he got to work. It pissed him off, certainly, but Ravi learned quickly in his six years as Richie’s manager that it was easier to lean into certain ridiculous whims that it was to fight them. His “re-situating” bullshit had always been a textbook example of what to give in to.

“I don’t need any time. I fucked up. Let’s get started on fixing it. Whatever you need me to do.”

On any other occasion, no questions would have been asked. Ravi would have taken full advantage of whatever bullshit Richie was on and milk it until he inevitably came to the closest thing the man could consider senses and tell him to fuck off. Hell, it wasn’t even like he hadn’t seen him in states identical to the one before him – unwashed, living in mess, giving weird answers to basic questions. He’d known Richie for quite a while and he knew there was shit he kept close to chest. The guy was as funny and charming and secretly brooding as any other hopeful comedian that came out to L.A., don’t get him wrong, but there was always something off about that last part. He never got the vibe that Richie was hiding away a shitty girlfriend or a secret pill addiction. Something else was hidden behind the dick jokes and too many beers on a Thursday. There had been a few occasions where Ravi had found himself urging Richie to go to bed and take the weekend to rest, not because he was several rounds of shots deep or because he hadn’t eaten all day. But because he was saying shit that Ravi couldn’t begin to understand. Talking about nightmares with abandoned houses and dolls and werewolves and kids, young fucking kids—

The version of Richie that stood before him was different. The dark cloud that encompassed him was still heavy and threatened to pour, but Ravi suspected that this was a different storm. And if he left Richie alone in his thoughts, the bottom would inevitably fall out and who knew what damage it would cause. Still, he had to offer.

“You sure? ‘Cause if you need the time and it’ll get you back to—”

“I’m sure.”

Ravi lifted the coffee cup back to his lips. “Alright. I’ll call the writers. Let’s get back in the game.”

Richie nodded, watching his agent take a seat at his kitchen island and start tapping away at his phone. His gaze drifted about the apartment, taking in the dirty dishes, the dead plants, the rug that hadn’t been vacuumed in… well, ever, mostly because he didn’t think he owned a vacuum. The thought that Eddie would utterly hate the state of the place came to mind before he could stop it. He could see him walk in and make that face that made him look like a displeased Muppet. He’d tell him about all the fucking microbes that lived in a dirty bathroom and how he almost certainly had an entire ecosystem festering in the back of his refrigerator. And Richie would just laugh and loop an arm around his shoulder, pinching his cheek like he did when they were eleven and Eddie complained that his aunts did the same thing whenever they visited—

He forced the thoughts to a halt. He didn’t need fucking Memory Lane; he needed To-Do List Avenue. As Ravi sat nearby to clean up the mess of his career, Richie did the next best thing and cleaned his apartment. Grabbing a trash bag from beneath his sink, he set to work, sweeping all but his agent’s breakfast into the garbage. At least it was a start.

******

_“When I'm on stage, and when I'm comfortable or uncomfortable, I have sort of a knee-jerk reaction to try to make people laugh. It's my version of a handshake to show that I want to make a connection and to show what I'm truly like. It's kind of my statement like, ‘This is what I'm really like. I'd like you to love me’_ _.”_

-Jenny Slate

******

The whole point of throwing himself headfirst into his work was to not think about Eddie. After all, comedy writing and performing was probably the polar opposite of risk analyzing. Well, the real polar opposite would probably have been a career like “sky diving instructor” or “lion tamer” or something else that had to do with nearly dying in one’s field and playing the odds in hopes that one _wouldn’t _die. But it was definitely the opposite in terms of levels of fun. What fun could someone even have as a risk analyst? “Bet you I could find out how likely you are to die in the next five years—” Oh, actually that would be pretty cool…

The point was that Richie didn’t expect that he would think about Eddie as much as he was when he was spending all his time in pitch meetings and windowless writing rooms. But he supposed the fact that he was dedicating himself entirely to his work was enough to get him on the subject. After all, Eddie had always been the hardest fucking worker he had ever known. Everything he did was with an insane streak of effort. Even when they were kids, he remembered dozens of school nights spent sat at various kitchen tables, watching Eddie pour over his notes like they held the fucking key to the universe. Rainbows of highlighters and color-coded post-it notes adorned every notebook, regardless of the subject, and he was always ready with a new study aid. Flashcards, practice tests, a million methods to ensure that every piece of information was crammed into that little head of his. And it wasn’t just school. He dedicated attention like that to every goddamn thing he got into. When the Capitol Theatre had added the Paperboy machine to its arcade, Eddie spent a month’s worth of allowance on tokens in order to have at least one game in the place where his name featured on the high score list. When his mom told him he wasn’t allowed to play any team sports when he got to high school, he resolved to join as much clubs as he could to spite her and force her to drive him to and from a dozen activities until she gave in and let him try out for track. When—

“Richie?”

Richie looked up from his notepad and focused in on the man sitting across from him. The name ‘Jordan’ came to mind, but he wasn’t certain that was right.

“Yeah?”

“What’re your thoughts?”

“My thoughts?”

“Yeah,” Jordan folded his hands together and nodded over to Richie’s side of the table. “I figured you had quite a few. You were writing through the whole pitch.”

Right. Pitch meeting. Shit. Writer’s room, spitball ideas, order pizza, make dick jokes, laugh about the shit the wife-girlfriend-bitch-ball-and-chain said that surely had no root in reality, come up with something that resembled a set for his triumphant return after his appearance on a dozen “Top 10 On Stage Celebrity Fails” listicles. He looked down at his notepad, hoping it would give him some idea as to what the fuck they had been talking about. Nothing but scribbles stared back at him.

“Uh…” He sighed, “I’m sorry, Jordan—”

“Josh.”

Richie squinted further down the table to another writer. “I thought you were Josh.”

The man shook his head. “No, I’m Ryan.”

“Then where the fuck am I getting Jordan from?”

Ravi interjected, hoping to stop the tangent before it went too far. “Rich, can we focus on the pitch, please?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Richie’s eyes trailed over the rest of the table. He couldn’t distinguish one guy from the other, a mass of grinning, chiseled-jawline-having mid-twenty-somethings staring at him expectantly. “I thought it was pretty strong. Maybe reword a couple lines that sounded clunky. You know the ones.”

That earned a chuckle from the group. They knew what he was talking about, even if Richie himself didn’t. It was just like school. All through elementary, middle, high school – even the two years he’d spent in college before he decided to bail – he was the master of faking it until he made it. Sure, his friends had claimed that that had to constitute as some level of intelligence; after all, one couldn’t fake anything if they didn’t have some idea of what it was they were pretending to know. But Richie had never seen it that way. He just thought he was funny, charming, and as much as he would claim otherwise, detail oriented. He could easily pick up what people wanted to hear, what teachers wanted out of assignments, just how much effort and interest was desired to think of him as worthwhile. He could get by, just as he was then. He’d pleased the Hydra-like amalgam of post-grad teeth-whiteners and earned their approval by giving them the answer they wanted.

“And, uh… yeah, e-mail it to me once you’ve worked that out and I’ll try it. I think it’s good. Lots to work with.”

Josh-Ryan-Mark-Eric spoke. “And you liked the part about trying on your girlfriend’s thong? I know that it’s a little…” He trailed off and the other heads of the beast snickered amongst themselves. Richie could practically see the word spell itself out across his notepad with a capital G-A-Y. He ripped the sheet off and crumpled it, tossing the wad over his shoulder.

“Sounded fine. Look, I’m actually fucking fried, you guys. It’s been a long week. So if you don’t mind, I’d really like to get home to go over this stuff myself and meet up again Thursday. That alright?”

The mass accepted his offering and prepared to collect their things. Ravi got to his feet and Richie knew well enough that he would have to haul some ass if he didn’t want to be questioned about his lack of focus. Barely checking to ensure he had his phone, the man was out the door and calling an Uber before anyone could say “Do you want to hit Seven Grand with us tonight?”.

If someone had asked, Richie would claim he expected his comedy career to be filled exclusively with nights of performances and giggling girls on his arms and drinking the fanciest cocktails clubs had to offer until the sun came up, allowing him to repeat such adventures the next evening. He would claim that because that was what he believed the right answer to be. But even when he had first started to break into the stand-up scene, he knew there was a lot of time to be spent honing the craft, doing research, practicing delivery and structure. Back when he wrote his own stuff, that was what most of his nights consisted of. And while his career started to look more like the expected fantasy as he rose in popularity, he secretly missed his nights of preparation. As he entered his apartment (newly immaculate, or at least as close as someone like him could get it to be) and noted that it was after five and that he didn’t have any plans for the rest of the evening or following day, he became very aware of just how long it had been since he had had such a night-in. Maybe that was what he needed. He had tried the “work himself into a coma” route to avoid thinking about everything that happened and that hadn’t helped. Maybe actually letting himself be alone and do something he liked would be good. Obviously crazy, he knew, but he was starting to run out of ideas and doing another bar crawl with his far younger writing team was no longer appealing.

So he settled onto his sofa with a beer in one hand and a notebook in another and turned on his TV. Scrolling through his Netflix list, he became a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of comedy specials he had allowed to pile up. Every time he saw one he thought looked interesting, he would add it and plan on watching it when he had a couple hours free. But time never seemed to be made and the list continued to grow. That’s what he told himself at least. After all, he always seemed to be able to make time for _Survivor _marathons or just another rewatch of _Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure_. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but a portion of his avoidance came from jealousy. Not of success, really. Richie was doing pretty well for himself, even with his Orpheum fuck-up. Hell, his own Netflix specials – _Trashmouth _(2012) and _Man of Many Voices _(2014) – still got relatively okay reviews after coming out years ago. But out of the writing. Because even just watching the trailers for these comedians’ specials, he found himself in awe of the humor, the originality, the sense of genuine work that went into the performances. And if all of that wasn’t a punch in the gut.

He tore his eyes from the screen to look down at the book in his lap. It wasn’t the one he brought with him to pitch meetings. No, he kept his personal notepad in his room, ready for his own ideas. It was filled with nonsense and half-baked bits that didn’t have complete openers or punchlines. And the same three-letter word he had seen swim across the paper during his writers’ discussion featured heavily in the pages of his personal work. All his own work and all things he couldn’t ever imagine taking to the stage. So he wasn’t jealous of other comedians’ success, but he was jealous of their honesty.

He turned back to the screen and selected a special at random. He couldn’t let himself stew in this. Getting his mind off of Eddie in favor of going down a hole of his own issues was not the route he wanted to take. Taking a pull of his beer before poising a pen at the top of a page, he resolved to study the performances like a biologist would study an animal’s behavior. That’d be enough of a distraction, right?

The idea fell apart three beers and two specials in. His notebook was on the floor. His pen had rolled somewhere beneath the couch. Richie’s head was lolling over the arm of his sofa, giggling as he watched Ali Wong perform from his upside-down point of view. Fuck, she was funny. He’d finished _Hard Knock Wife, _hadn’t even bothered to start dinner before he started _Baby Cobra_, and he was already planning on watching that rom-com she was listed as a lead for when she started into a bit that had him sitting upright.

_“I want my husband to get us to, like, a certain point financially,” _She said, speaking to the audience like she was sharing an important point of sincerity, _“I want to get to the point as a couple where I can comfortably afford sliced mango.”_

Richie’s brows furrowed. Was sliced mango more expensive than normal mango? He didn’t buy much fresh fruit, let alone mangoes specifically, to have a frame of reference.

_“You know what I’m talking about? I’m talking about that Whole Foods mango. That $10 a box Whole Foods mango that was sliced by white people. That’s the kind of income bracket I’m striving for.”_

Richie huffed a laugh. Whole Foods: that explained it all. He tried going into the one near his apartment building, but once he learned that the $15 price tag on a pack of deli meat wasn’t a mistake, he dropped his basket and ran.

_“That’s when you know you’ve made it – when you’re eating mango that was sliced by a dude named Noah. I want Noah mango, Rebecca kiwi, Danielle pineapple.”_

He let his head fall back as he laughed. He even snorted, something he tried to cover up nowadays when he got too lost in himself. Absently, he grasped for his phone and opened his contacts. He didn’t know why he did it; he hadn’t spoken to the other Losers beyond the occasional “thumbs-up” reaction to a travel selfie from Mike or a check-in with Stan in the group chat Ben had created for them before they all went their separate ways from the hospital. The chat he created was completely blank, void of any communication of any kind. It held hundreds of possibilities. Potential openings, apologies, expressions of guilt waited to be typed onto the screen and sent off to the man Richie had done his best not to think about for the last several weeks. He hunched over the screen and typed.

‘Does whole foods really sell sliced mango? Like fresh sliced mango so you don’t have to get your hands dirty cutting it yourself?’

He watched the ‘delivered’ text appear beneath his blue bubble and he waited. Ali Wong continued to speak in the background, talking about paint-balling with a Vietnam veteran. He didn’t have a chance to force his attention back to the screen when his phone buzzed in his hands.

_‘Yeah. But it’s not as fresh. Better to buy and slice yourself so you know your hands were clean when cutting it. Why?’_

“Oh my God,” He muttered into his empty apartment. He shook his head and tapped back a reply.

‘Of course you fucking know the freshness quality of GD whole foods mangoes. What else do you know? How healthy their low-fat quinoa is?’

The response was almost immediate.

_‘Quinoa is a grain ingredient dumb ass. It can’t be made to be low-fat. How do you even know what quinoa is? All you ate in Derry was Chinese food and gas station pizza.’_

Richie laughed. The texts fired back and forth throughout the night. Eating habits drifted into preferred local eateries and a debate about chains versus independent restaurants. That built into an argument over whose city was superior and how each believed themselves to have the worst traffic story of all time. Eventually, said retellings led to a discussion about their dream cars and how neither could buy their desired vehicles (Richie because he didn’t drive enough to warrant owning a car and Eddie because he didn’t want to worry about the insurance for such a ride). As said revelations started to morph into Richie digging into Eddie about his choice in careers, the former finally cast a glance towards the top of his screen. He winced. Almost immediately, he felt the weight of the late hour fall over him and he struggled to keep his eyes open.

‘Shit man. I should get to bed.’

_‘Yeah?’_

‘Yeah. I don’t want to fuck up my sleep schedule again. Just got over the jet lag. Gotta be responsible like the grown-up I am now 😜’

_‘I’m going to block your number if you send another fucking emoji’_

A smile tugged at his lips. He typed a final reply, thumb poised over the rainbow of heart options. Staring for a brief moment, he quickly scrolled back and made a different choice.

‘Good night Eds 😴’

_‘Night rich’_

Turning off his phone and placing his glasses beside it, Richie shifted down beneath his covers. As sleep began to overtake him, he momentarily considered the hour. How far ahead was New York anyway? If he’d started texting at eight in L.A. and it was almost three am now… Before he could divulge too deeply into the math, he drifted off, oblivious.

******

_“I don’t ever want to steal your time, ‘cause you seem fine. But I feel blue. I don’t want to say the things I do, ‘cause I know I feel it more than you”_

-KT Tunstall, “One Day”

******

The texting continued. Not that Richie expected it to be a one-time thing, but he had been the one to initiate it and it wasn’t like the two of them had left off on the best of notes the previous month. The hours-long conversation could have very well been the last one and he probably would have reminded himself that Eddie didn’t owe him any kind of response, not after Richie fucking exploded his shit on him and, hell, maybe he was freaked out because the last time he saw him, Richie had told him he was fucking gay and tried to make-out in the middle of his hotel room. None of the Losers knew and now Eddie, of all people, did and it would be in everyone’s best interests for that evening of texting to be a single instance—

Except he woke up to a notification. Unlocking his phone, Richie was greeted with a scowling Eddie. He was sitting in what looked like a waiting room, if the framed motivational poster behind his head was anything to go by. He was wearing one of those stupid polos he’d been practically living in when they had gone to Derry, and he had a pair of sunglasses hanging from the neck like a fucking dad. The most hilarious feature of the photo was not the perfect upside-down ‘U’ his lips made, but the middle finger that was pressed against one of the bags beneath his eyes. Richie let out a laugh before he read the actual text.

_‘your dumb ass kept me up all night so I look like shit for my lunch meeting’_

Richie didn’t even have to consider his reply.

‘sorry i’m so wonderfully entertaining. Should have shaved before you left you look like a college student trying to deal drugs to high schoolers’

And thus the communications continued. All of it blended seamlessly into Richie’s life, like it was always meant to be there. Every night he went to bed sending Eddie a stupid emoji and every morning he woke up to some blurry picture taken during the man’s daily routine. Throughout the days, they’d send one another random thoughts, ridiculous photos, links to things read or watched or listened to.

_‘I just saw a kid wearing a shirt with your fucking face on it at the grocery store. You’re the reason I almost beat up a fourteen year old.’_

‘You think if I asked Bill for signed copies of all his books he’d think it was sweet and not because I want to sell them to get a new tv?’

_‘What the fuck do you mean you haven’t seen raiders of the lost ark? You have Netflix I know you’re at home watch it right now’_

‘check out this weird dog I saw. He looks just like you’

On several occasions, Richie contemplated sliding things into more… complex territory. He’d typed out a proper apology for how he’d acted at the hotel multiple times, but never had the courage to send it. Other messages were reread and deemed too promiscuous, too heavy-leaning on dick jokes to be just a gross straight dude, too flirty to be his usual mode of affectionate. If Richie let himself truly think about his frantic considerations, he would realize why he didn’t want to be so blatant with Eddie when he already knew, but he wouldn’t even allow himself to go down that hole. Not even when Ravi hit him with a particularly off-putting piece of news.

“You’re kidding.”

“Oh yeah, I love to make jokes about saving your career like the superhero that I am.”

They were sitting in a Village Pizzeria: Ravi’s pick under the claim that it was his “cheat day”. He’d insisted Richie join him in order to hash out some details regarding his return to the stage and after the latter had scarfed down half a pie, Ravi broke the news. That Thursday, he would be on a flight to New York, ready for interviews with various online publications before finally appearing on _Late Night with Seth Meyers_ to announce his new Netflix special.

“But…” Richie paused, picking up a napkin to wipe some sauce from his mouth. Not because he suddenly cared about his appearance, but for the sake of doing something while he collected his thoughts, “I don’t have a new special.”

“Not yet, you don’t,” Ravi replied, “But you will. I met with some executives last week and they want to shoot one. Since your flop at the Orpheum, the traffic on your performances has skyrocketed. People are interested in what happened, Rich.”

“So I’m supposed to make some jokes about the fucking emergency I had that made me embarrass myself on stage?”

Ravi rolled his eyes, long ago used to his client’s theatrics. “I just mean they want to see you perform again. You don’t have to talk about whatever bender you went off on—”

“It wasn’t a bender.”

“How the fuck do I know? You won’t tell me shit about what happened and I’m not going to play an elimination game to figure out where you wandered off to. I don’t care enough. So as far as I’m concerned, you went M.I.A. and I’m sure there’s something to be talked about there. And if there isn’t, then work with the writers to create a new set for you and we’ll finalize the details.” As if to punctuate his statements, he took a bite of his pizza and gestured to the table, “You finished?”

Richie cast his gaze to the plate. All that remained of his half a pie were a couple of gnawed crusts. His stomach hurt. “Yeah.”

“Good.” After a moment of silence, Ravi sighed and set down his slice. “Rich, I care about you, alright? I wouldn’t be your agent for as long as I have if I didn’t. I’m not going to force you to talk about whatever happened. But I am going to need you to help me a little bit. I can’t keep this going if you’re not going to work with me. That fair?”

Richie felt like he was back in elementary school, listening to teachers tell him that they wanted him to do well, that they knew he was smart, but he needed to pull his weight. Back then, he would want to roll his eyes and scoff and just do the work to get through to summer. But now there wasn’t a summer vacation waiting for him at the end of this goal. What was there? Masturbation jokes and girlfriend bits and being forty years old and still in the fucking closet-

“Yeah, that’s fair,” He let an easy smile pass over his face, and he could see Ravi’s shoulders relax, “I gotta take a leak. We can set up another meeting with the guys when I get back, alright?” All the cheese and dough and garlic were sitting in his stomach like a stone.

“Sounds good.” Ravi assured, not even looking at him as he dove back into his meal.

In bed that evening, Richie squinted over his messages. He knew he could very well put his glasses back on to read them, but bed equated to going to sleep in his mind, and thus included the removal of his glasses. He wasn’t about to go against ritual, even if it was probably making his eyesight worse and adding to his need for glasses in the first place. The last text from Eddie had been sent that afternoon, a massive paragraph containing a rant about being completely unwilling to bike to work, despite his desire to do so, because New York was one of the most unfriendly cities when it came to bikers, or really anyone for that matter—

Making the decision to completely negate the tirade, Richie sent an inquiry.

‘Got any good restaurants to rec to me in the city?’

_‘As opposed to all the shitty restaurants I would recommend.’_

Richie snorted. Asshole.

_‘Norma is a good Italian place. And the grey dog is great for anything. Know a couple bars too. Why?’_

Richie bit his lip. He knew that the whole point of asking was so he could tell Eddie that he was coming. Hell, the guy would find out if he happened to watch any sort of late night television and while he didn’t want to get a big head or anything, Richie had a feeling that his friend wouldn’t be too pleased if he had come and gone from Eddie’s new home state without a peep. He slowly typed out a reply.

‘Flying into NY for the weekend. Interviews and shit. Figured I’d see some sights and I’ll need to eat at some point’

He stared at the text, waiting to see three familiar dots appear in the chat. Instead, the same scowling photograph Eddie had sent him after their first conversation took over his screen and his phone began to buzz. He nearly dropped his phone, eyes blown wide. Fuck!

Fumbling to accept the call, he raised the phone to his ear. “Christ, man. What’re you doing? You know no one calls anymore.”

“Fuck off, you’re Gen X. Stop acting like a millennial.”

A smile instantly spread across Richie’s face. He missed Eddie’s voice. Shit, couldn’t think about what _that _meant.

“Fucking weird that you know age cut-offs for generations. Did some teen make fun of you?”

“Fuck you. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to New York?”

“I just found out about it today!” Richie sat up against his headboard, absently tugging at his hair. For a moment, he thought of how Stan would do the same as a kid when he was nervous. “I swear. My agent told me at lunch and I figured I’d get some suggestions—”

“Screw suggestions! I’ll take you somewhere, man. Show you around. Have you been to New York before?”

The truth was he had. Richie had gone to New York a good number of times over the course of his career. Mostly for various tours, a couple for talk show interviews, and once, prior to listing with Ravi, to audition for SNL. But for a moment, he let his mind wander. Eddie showing him his new home state through his eyes. Seeing stupid tourist traps with the guy that wouldn’t shut up about parents never making their kids wash their hands enough and how he was probably going to get measles because an anti-vax mom let their kid touch the Statue of Liberty or something. Going to some hole-in-the-wall restaurant Eddie insisted was the best and arguing over the benefits of splitting an appetizer.

“Nope. First time.”

“Awesome! I can show you around. There’s a great coffee place on the corner of—”

Richie didn’t even hear Eddie’s plans or suggestions. He was too busy trying to make sure his smile didn’t rip his face open.

******

_“Toe to toe with you, losing control with you. Wanna know, would you rip me to pieces?”_

-CRUISR, “All Over”

******

In the end, Richie knew he should have expected that the planets would align to fuck him over.

Despite Ravi making the trip sound like one of relative ease, it was anything but. As he was finally zipping his duffel bag, he received a notification that signaled the arrival of his itinerary. From the moment his plane landed in New York, his weekend was stuff to the gills. Interviews with ten different online publications, a lunch meeting with one of the Netflix directors (“It’s just to get some face time in, Rich.”), drinks with the staff at the UCB Theatre to <strike>schmooze</strike> ensure that they were alright with the special being filmed there, essentially spending the day at NBC before filming the Seth Meyers interview, and an ass o’clock early flight on Sunday so he could keep talking with the writers and get the special completely ready as soon as possible. After doing his best to form a schedule in his mind, he realized he was left with a couple hours at the end of Saturday before he was due to be unconscious in a business class seat on a flight back to L.A. He contemplated telling Ravi to fuck off, but he knew he was still on pretty thin ice after his disappearing act. Instead, he expressed his apologies to Eddie and the pair remade plans that at least allowed them to get dinner after the last of his interviews finished up.

The entire trip passed as a blur. Richie would have been worried that he had somehow said the wrong thing or done something stupid in his haze, but he never seemed to garner any weird looks or asked for clarification on whatever shit he said, so surely he was doing well enough, right? He knew he should be paying attention, showing some level of interest in Ravi’s major fucking attempt to put his career back together, but all that was playing in his mind – over and over, like one of those creepy-ass nursery rhymes that all the horror movies liked to make little kids sing in trailers – was _dinner with Eddie. Dinner with Eddie. Din-ner with Edd-ie._

Soon enough, he was standing at the entrance of The Penrose. He was definitely going to give Eddie shit for picking a place with a name like that. Well, he would, if he could _fucking go inside. _He could feel his hands shaking and he looked down at them, hoping to will them to stop. Christ, did they always look that veiny? He cursed and shoved them back into his pockets. Was he even dressed nice enough for a place like this? The Penrose, while ridiculous, sounded fancy, and now that he was outside it, he was second-guessing his entire outfit. He had on the nicest pair of pants he owned, but that wasn’t saying much, since they weren’t really that nice. And they were jeans. Well, they didn’t have stains. Or holes. He was already sweaty, even though the unforgiving New York sun had set a while ago. Richie told himself he was just hot-blooded - that even with all the shit he said about people who claimed that California had a “dry heat”, his body had apparently forgotten how the east coast humidity fucking drenches you – but he couldn’t ignore the voice in his head that reminded him that he changed his shirt three times before finally leaving his hotel room. Hell, reminded him that he brought several shirts to choose from in the first place. That voice could suck his dick. He pushed open the door to the bar.

Richie wasn’t sure why he expected more people. Maybe he’d grown used to LA’s constant “early to bed, early to rise” mantra and thought New York would be the polar opposite. Still, it was a Saturday night and he could feasibly move between people without being crushed. The Penrose was how he imagined it would be. Quiet, modern-looking, and clean; he had to figure that was exactly what Eddie looked for in such a place. There was a lot of hardwood, exposed brick, and soft music playing, as a fair amount of people in business-casual attire milled around, most likely off of work for happy hour. Richie felt nauseous. He’d never really had a regular nine-to-five job or co-workers he’d go out for drinks with. Did Eddie have that? Did Eddie have work friends he hung around and had inside jokes with and—

“No! No—” A familiar angry voice interrupted his train of thought, “I’m not going to do that. I’ve— Don’t interrupt me. Please. I’ve already talked to Morgan, it’s done. It’s done, okay? I’m not having this conversation anymore.” 

Richie followed the irritability and found Eddie sitting at the bar. He watched him slam his phone down next to a half-finished drink. He was wearing a button-down with a loosened tie, his sleeves rolled up.

He looked like half the other customers in the bar.

He looked like the goddamn nine-to-fiver he was.

He looked way better than the last time Richie had seen him face-to-face.

He…

He looked good.

_Fuck_.

Eddie sighed and put his head in his hands, rubbing his fingers to his temples. Richie felt something tug at his stomach. For a moment, he contemplated running up to Eddie and giving him a noogie like he would when they were younger. He decided against it and just slid into the vacant seat beside him.

“I suppose they just let any ol’ bastard in here, huh?” He put on a Voice, a deep southern drawl reminiscent of the cowboy movies he used to watch with his mom, and slapped a hand against Eddie’s shoulder.

Eddie’s face lit up and the tugging in Richie’s stomach became more severe.

“Clearly, since you got in just fine.” Eddie shot back. For a second, it looked like he was about to reach out and touch Richie. A handshake, an arm squeeze. A hug? But he reached for his drink instead. 

Richie swallowed and gave a smaller smile. “It’s good to see you, loser.”

“Yeah. You too.” Eddie said quietly, looking at him for maybe a second longer than Richie would have. Probably judging the fact that his shirt was wrinkled. He knew he should have worn something else. Richie grabbed the drink menu for the sake of having somewhere to put his eyes, somewhere that wasn’t his friend. Why was it so hard now? Everything had been so easy over text, on the phone. Even with all of the pictures and the messages, there was still that many-mile distance. That distance let him make believe that things weren’t weird, that it wouldn’t be even a little uncomfortable to see Eddie again after Richie had kind of implied that they would never meet up after what he said in the bathroom--

“What are you drinking?”

Richie pulled himself from his thoughts. “Uh… just a Coke.” He waved down the bartender.

Eddie raised his eyebrows, a silent question.

Richie let his shoulder slump dramatically. “6am flight. Unfortunately, I didn’t retain my youthful ability to bounce back from bad hangovers. I feel that’s a fair exchange for keeping my dashing good looks.”

Eddie rolled his eyes, the corners of his lips quirking up ever to slightly. “A Coke, and another gin and tonic please,” He told the bartender. While the drinks were prepared, Eddie’s phone buzzed loudly on the counter. He ignored it. But as the buzzing continued and the pair couldn’t help looking at it, Eddie snatched it up and put it in his pocket. Whoever he was speaking to was apparently not ready to finish their discussion.

Richie cleared his throat. “So… uh… how’s the chest?”

Eddie’s hand instinctively drifted to his shirt and toyed with the buttons. “It’s healed fine. Still hurts though.” 

He resisted the urge to say something snarky, something like “Oh really?” or “No shit, man”. After all, of course it hurt. And it probably fucking hurt even more during the healing process. Mostly because Richie hadn’t been there. Because Richie had bailed out on his promise to help. Because Richie couldn’t handle the guy he’d been pining over since he was a kid not immediately jumping for joy when he told him he was a queer. Because, despite nearly losing him forever, Richie decided to run back to L.A. to lick his wounds and leave Eddie to fix his literal fucking wounds all by himself— “I bet you have a bad-ass scar.”

Eddie rolled his eyes again. Richie forgot how much he did that and how much he loved being the cause of it. “Oh yeah, I look like a regular G.I. Joe action figure. Real bad-ass. Never mind the possibility of a thousand types of complications post-surgery. Did you know that surgical incisions and stitches are often more at risk for infections than you—”

Richie pretended to heave and made puking noises, leaning towards Eddie. “Gonna—barf. So—so boring—!”

“Oh, I’m soooo sorry,” Eddie moaned, “That my medical insight is boring. Which by the way, is appreciated at my job, where I get fucking paid to know this stuff.”

“Wow, you get paid to be a bitchy little know-it-all? When can I start?”

“Sorry, they don’t pay people without college degrees. Come back when you've got your bachelor’s.” Eddie snapped back.

“Ouch,” Richie clasped a hand to his chest. “Right to the heart. Guess I’ll have to un-smoke all that weed and apologize to my roommates so they’ll take me back. Don’t know if I can un-fuck my bio professor’s mom though. I think that might damage my chances of re-admission.”

Eddie snorted and Richie grinned. If anyone was ease-dropping on their conversation, they would have probably assumed they actually hated each other. Their teasing could get a bit rough. But Richie never felt more at ease than when Eddie was making fun of him, when they were hurling insults back and forth, when they both said something so ridiculous, it ended up with both of them laughing so hard they cried.

_Dude! Stop it or I’ll piss my pants._

_You’re not joking. Holy shit, I see a dribble coming down now! Stan, you’ve got some urine competition—_

_You’re fucking nasty. Shut up! _

They continued to chat, mostly keeping it light and making jabs at each other. They complained about the summer heat. They discussed the ridiculous names Stan had informed them belonged to his birds. They debated how soon it would be before Bill asked all of them if he could write a book about what happened. Neither brought up the last time they saw each other in person. Richie acted like it never happened and Eddie pointedly didn’t ask about Richie’s love life. Richie tried to do the same, he really did, but he couldn’t help himself. His mouth always did run faster than his brain and, in this case, the questions of how the new Mrs. Kaspbrak was doing crossed the finish line before he could consider how much he didn’t want to open that can of worms. 

“Yeah, she’s… she’s doing…” Eddie sighed and the heels of his hands came up to press against his eyes, “We’re getting divorced.” He looked paler, making the bags beneath his eyes pop all the more when his hands dropped to the bar.

Richie’s heart skipped a beat. “Oh.”

Eddie downed the rest of his drink. Richie’s Coke was just vaguely brown water at that point, but he drank it to avoid looking for something more to say. 

“I should have figured it was going to happen eventually. I just didn’t want to be the one to do it,” He shrugged. “I never wanted to be the bad guy. And it’s been ten years. _Ten years_. You can’t just throw that down the drain, right? And she’s not a bad person. Really.” Eddie added, as if reading Richie’s mind. “But she wasn’t happy; I wasn’t happy. God, both of us were unhappy. It’s been coming for so long and it would have been so much easier if I just sucked it up and stopped waiting for her to be the one to want to end it, but I was too chicken-shit to do anything about it. Guess killing that fucking clown finally pushed me in the right direction. Nearly getting murdered in a sewer makes filing for divorce look so easy.” Eddie exhaled and finally shifted his gaze from his hands to Richie.

“I mean… if anything, that clown pushed you in the wrong direction. You got impaled.”

Eddie almost fell off the bar stool laughing, and Richie joined in, cackling so hard he started to snort. Any judgments, any bitterness or nerves from their last face-to-face conversation melted away as they sat there, struggling to catch their respective breaths. Richie knew it wasn’t even that funny; it was more of laughing at the absurdity of it all. Laughing at how they killed an inter-dimensional clown that had fucked up their memories and lives for the past twenty-seven years, how now they were worried about early flights and soon-to-be-exes.

“Excuse me, garçon?” Richie wheezed, motioning towards the bartender. 

“You did not just call that poor man garçon. You are such an asshole.”

Richie waved off his comment. “We would like four shots of tequila, please. Thank you, my good man.”

The bartender nodded and disappeared beneath the bar. The place was filling up as the sky darkened. The music got a little louder and the drinks started pouring faster. 

“Aren’t you going to the airport at like five tomorrow?”

Richie made a noise and put on a preachy Voice. “Listen. You are becoming a free man. It is a time for celebration! A time of triumph and success, not for hang-overs or migraines or such earthly toils.”

The bartender placed four shot glasses in front of them. Richie grabbed two and raised both at Eddie. After a moment of contemplation, Eddie snatched one and raised it back.

“To new beginnings.” Richie said.

“Wow, that’s actually kind of genuine,” Eddie replied as their glasses clinked together. They tilted their heads back in unison, downing the tequila before they slammed the glasses on the bar.

Richie didn’t wait to chug the other, stacking the glasses as he turned to look about the rest of the establishment. “Now, who here has a thing for risk-analysts? It’s not exactly glamorous, but everyone’s got a fetish, right? My friend Eduardo is hot and ready to trot.” He shouted over the music, turning a few heads his way. 

Eddie’s face turned beet-red and he shoved his hand over Richie’s mouth. Thank God most people were too wrapped up in their own conversations to listen to Richie’s bullshit, but of those that turned their way, most scowled and one woman outright laughed. Before he could process his embarrassment, Eddie felt something warm and wet run over his palm. He yanked his hand back, wheezing out a noise that was just short of a scream. He wiped Richie’s spit on the man’s shirt. 

“Oh fuck, you’re disgusting!” Eddie screeched. “Do you know how many germs are in the human mouth?”

“Do you know how many drinks I’ve had?” Richie asked, grabbing Eddie’s remaining shot and swallowing it. “More than you! Catch up! If you want to gain instant confidence to meet new ladies now that you’re a single, not-explicitly-ugly man, you’ve got to catch up.”

Eddie scoffed but ordered another drink, thankful to have a glass big enough to hide his smile behind. They continued talking, more about Richie’s comedy, which Eddie had a million things wrong with, and the promotion at work Eddie was hoping to get, which Richie made fun of him for. The drinks kept coming, arriving in more ridiculous glasses with more outrageous names, and suddenly Richie was very aware of how warm and hazy the bar had become. The only thing in focus was Eddie. He assured himself that staring at Eddie the way he was would help him reorient himself, help him make the rest of his surroundings less fuzzy. That was why he was so intent on watching Eddie as he ordered another drink, told him how unsanitary bar peanuts were, dug his phone out of his pants to show him the photo he took of his office to show him. Richie had a feeling he should be more concerned about the stares and that he was getting dangerously close to falling back into that hole of being in love with the guy that didn’t love him back. But he was too drunk to care. Eddie kept talking faster and faster, and Richie swore he was watching thirteen-year-old Eddie lay into Stan for not washing the hairnets in their fort. Or when Eddie screamed at Bev for tricking him into seeing _The Exorcist _when they did a throwback screening at The Capitol Theatre. Or when Eddie couldn’t believe Ben wasn’t wearing safety goggles when he sanded two-by-fours for the clubhouse. 

“Shit,” Eddie said, stirring Richie back out of his thoughts. “I’m fuckin’ wasted.”

Richie giggled, certain he sounded like a teenage girl and not having it in him to care. “Me too.”

“You… you started this. It’s your fault.” Eddie stuck his finger out and poked Richie in the chest.

Richie held up a hand. “Guilty as charged, sir.”

“I can’t drive. Order an Uber, will ya’?” Eddie pulled out his phone before waiting for an answer, making a point to ignore his many waiting notifications.

“Ugh, I’ll just walk. I think my hotel isn’t too far. Gotta’ pack all my shit so I can check out before the flight. They’re real stingy ‘bout that crap.” Richie pulled his phone out too, squinted, took off his glasses, squinted again, and put them back on. He recognized the United Airlines logo, but he couldn’t make out much else. He shoved the device beneath Eddie’s nose.

“What’s that say?”

For once, Eddie didn’t complain and just scanned the message. “Your flight’s delayed four hours.”

Richie groaned. “I’m too drunk for this. I gotta’ call the hotel. See if I can check out later.” Richie took his phone back and started dialing.

“Fuck that,” Eddie scoffed, “Let’s just grab your shit and you can crash at my place. I don’t think shitty comedians can afford late check out fees.”

Richie laughed and agreed. He tried to pay for the drinks too, but Eddie waved him off and flashed a dark-colored credit card. Richie was impressed and, if he was being honest with himself, a little turned on. Downing the last of their drinks, they made their way outside to wait for their ride. They stopped by Richie’s hotel, where he ran up to his room to grab his duffel bag. He tripped up the stairs in the process and earned a too-loud laugh from Eddie and a glare from another passing guest. Richie shoved all of his belongings in the duffel bag, which consisted of a couple pairs of boxers, a toothbrush, his phone charger, and the other several shirts he couldn’t choose between before his arrival at the bar. Eddie managed to comment only twice on his childish packing skills. Richie checked out with the front desk and the pair climbed into their final Uber of the evening.

By then, neither could manage a proper whisper, so their conversation about who of their friends cried in bed (they settled upon Ben, but only because he couldn't look at Beverly for too long without weeping) definitely reached their poor driver. 

“Be sure to give him like 10 stars.” Richie said once they were standing on the curb.

“There’s only five stars, asshole. Plus that car needed a vacuum.”

They stumbled into Eddie’s apartment building and took the elevator up to his loft. It was really nice; a little sparse, but nice. High ceilings, lots of windows, an open kitchen and living room. Richie noticed there were some boxes laying around. He wondered if Eddie moved out or if Myra had.

“What a step-up from 2130 Bellview Lane,” Richie professed, running his hand along the granite counter.

Eddie snorted. “Yeah, but I didn't have much of a choice. Real estate goes fast in New York and I'm lucky this place had central air and no asbestos.”

“Wow, you sound so sexy talking about real estate,” Richie blurted out. He realized it needed to sound more sarcastic because he actually meant it.

Eddie didn’t seem to notice or care, and waved Richie off. “Anyway, I’m fucking tired, man. There’s a spare bedroom down the hallway on the right. Let me know if you need anything, and don’t screw me out of my security deposit.”

“Oh.” For some reason, Richie hadn’t expected a spare bedroom or a couch or whatever. He’d expected… well, he hadn’t expected anything. His imagination of Eddie’s apartment and what would go down there was just a big white screen. Or at least that was what he let himself think. So the spare bedroom didn’t fucking matter. It was fine. Everything was fine. Great, even. He’d reconnected with Eddie, gotten drunk with him like they were teenagers, and finally wasn’t thinking about the last time they’d been alone together. He wasn’t about to let whatever expectations he had get in the way of how good he felt.

Eddie showed him down the hall to where the spare bedroom was, pointing out the closet and bathroom along the way. He was just threatening Richie with what he would do if the bed wasn’t made in the morning when he paused. 

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” Eddie asked.

Richie struggled to think of a response, something clever and snarky and fitting of the friendship he was trying to recreate. Instead he shook his head. “I missed getting yelled at by you.”

Eddie seemed ready to go on the defensive, but his shoulders released and he allowed a small smile. 

“I missed you too.”

There was a long pause and for a second, Eddie looked like he was going to say something else. His mouth opened and shut, his teeth clicking together and seeming to echo through the apartment. It was a really pretty mouth, Richie noticed. But they’d both sobered up some since the bar, and Richie could practically feel boundaries sliding back in place, barriers coming down like railroad-crossing gates with red, flashing lights that said “don’t even fucking think about it”. For a moment, Richie felt like crying. Just a little.

“Well, thanks for letting me crash. Glad your mom isn’t here. Otherwise, I’d really get no sleep, if you know what I mean,” Richie patted Eddie’s shoulder and slid past him into the room, refusing to meet his eyes. 

“Fuck you, Tozier.” Eddie huffed, though there was no animosity behind it. He shut the door.

Richie flopped on the bed, barely managing to take his glasses off before he curled around the presumably expensive pillows. As he drifted off, he let his mind wander back to one particular memory. Before the screaming match outside the Capitol Theatre, before Bill and Stan fondly called Eddie a pussy and launched him into his tirade against Bev for lying about the screening, before the lights came up over the seats and Mike could unintentionally point out Eddie’s anxious tears. Richie was fourteen and he was with all of his friends, excited to see one of his favorite movies. It was coming up on his favorite part, when Regan’s head would spin around and she would blow chunks all over the priest, and he was glancing at each of his friends, ready to see the reactions from those that hadn’t seen it. When he finally looked to his direct right, expecting to see Eddie’s signature scowl and obvious displeasure, he was met the sight of his friend huddled as far back in his seat as he could manage, his face almost completely hidden in his shirt. His hands were gripping the arm rests like he was ready to rip them clean off.

Richie was always so careful of how he presented himself. Sure, he could be an asshole and he liked to make a fool of himself. But he wasn’t a complete idiot. He knew what he needed to do to avoid being spotted. He knew how to keep his dick jokes one hundred percent straight. He knew where to stop his physical affection so it didn’t cross a line. But seeing Eddie crumpled up like a paper bag, wheezing so dangerously close to an inhaler-needing level, Richie didn’t even need a second to think. He slid his hand over Eddie’s, forcing his fingers between the smaller boy’s to get him to stop clawing the seat. Instantly, Eddie’s head popped out from the neck hole of his shirt. But rather than staring at Richie or asking what he was doing, he turned to press his face into his friend’s shoulder. The breathing started to ease, the wheezing becoming less rough, more even.

And Richie was fucking _gone._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the Ben crying about seeing how beautiful Beverly is is in reference to this post: https://riddleblack246.tumblr.com/post/188341408138/kissbridging-im-so-obsessed-with-how-bill-and


	3. August

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We don't need to tell y'all that a shit ton of stuff has happened since the last chapter was posted. Thanks for reading/sticking with this even with an eight-ish month gap between chapters. We're still trucking.

******

_“Tell me again about how much it hurts, being awfully loud for an introvert.”_

-dodie, “Monster”

******

Given his nosophobia, hypochondria, and overall distrust of anything unclean (though he was very reluctant to admit to such things – he preferred to consider himself “cautious”), it would not be an unfair leap to think Eddie Kaspbrak to be a homebody. But a childhood in which a good chunk of it was spent begging and bargaining with his mother to let him go outside and spend time with his friends had an impact. He didn’t like to be cooped up, at least not for extended periods. Back in Derry, he would often carry on about how disgusting the outdoors was, how not taking proper precautions would inevitably lead to dangerous outcomes, how – _No, Ben, I don’t want to bike to the dump. Does that surprise you? Do you know how easy it is to get tetanus there? I don’t care if Bev’s going too—Well, if everyone’s going… I just want to make sure no one’s fucking leg’s going to get amputated, alright!? _The indoors felt too cramped. As a kid, it had been because his mother’s presence was too big, overpowering, and after he had finally stood up to her about his “medications”, the weight of her presence was replaced with the stifling discomfort of the truth. Neither wanted to address her lies. Even after they moved from Derry and many of the memories of his childhood had been glossed over, the burden of their strained relationship stayed.

The claustrophobia that came with being inside didn’t exclusively stem from his own home. Each member of the Losers’ Club tended to be reluctant to offer up their places, regardless of when the summer sun threatened to melt them all to puddles of sweat or when the New England winters promised to turn their lips blue. Many homes were not to be visited for obvious reasons, but even those that were more suitable options were rarely spent time in. Leroy Hanlon didn’t say anything on the few occasions that Mike brought his friends over to the farm, but they could all sense that the man wasn’t all that pleased with a bunch of kids hanging around his house and none of them were too keen on the idea of being so close to the old Bowers property. Ben’s place was alright but given that his mother had moved in with her sister, there was often the unspoken expectation that they were to invite his cousin to join their “play dates”, as she called them. It was easier to avoid his place altogether than to try and guess when his extended family was home. If there was no other option but to be inside (and the library was closed and none of them could afford a movie ticket), they would go to Richie’s house. Nothing kept them from going there; his place was pretty big, usually clean, and – as Beverly liked to point out – had actual name-brand snacks. In fact, his parents were often adamant that he have his friends over more, hopeful that some of their manners would rub off on their son. But Eddie knew why none of them liked to go over there too much. Or at least, he knew why _he_ didn’t like to. Because every time Mrs. Tozier insisted that they all call her “Maggie” or Mr. Tozier came back at his son with a comment even wittier than the one Richie had made, he couldn’t help thinking about how his mother had made him an hour late to meet his friends, crying about how he was avoiding her. About how she never knew what he was doing anymore. About how he was all she had; didn’t he understand that? Every moment of normality that Eddie witnessed in the Tozier household made his stomach hurt with jealousy. He hated feeling angry, especially when that anger was directed at someone because they were _loved_.

Even as an adult, being inside made him antsy. Sitting back and catching up on _The Good Wife _with Myra reminded him too much of days spent on an overstuffed couch watching _Family Ties _with his mother and hammering back enough chicken soup and sugar pills to make anyone’s head spin. So, whenever he could, he went out. Morning runs before work, lunch breaks away from the office, evening walks when Myra wanted time to call her sister and he could manage to sneak out before she could convince him that he was bound to get mugged or attacked or worse. After remembering all that had happened to him, his habits became all the more necessary. Not because he’d somehow developed more idiosyncrasies since his return from Maine (he had, but that wasn’t why), but because he had nearly fucking died.

Eddie Kaspbrak, who had essentially been preparing his final will and testament since he was twelve (“To Bill Denbrough, I leave all of my _Thundercats_ action figures. Except for Lion-O, whom I would like to be buried with.”), was finally having his ongoing midlife crisis validated. In a way, it was comforting. Like being made into a clown-alien hor d’oeuvre explained away his constant, ever-looming fear of death in a way that his mother’s Munchausen’s by proxy and Myra’s controlling behavior couldn’t. Thus, as he began to methodically set fire to the life he had built for himself over the last twenty years, he leaned more strongly into his sources of comfort. Namely, The Great Outdoors.

Or the closest he could get in New York City. On the rare occasions he had a day off, having used pretty much all of his vacation days on his “visit” to Derry and the recovery that followed, Eddie found himself in Morningside Park. He had started going soon after he moved to Manhattan. It was a short walk from his office, an easy drive (a less easy run, if he was really desperate to blow off some steam) from the townhouse he and Myra had shared, and while it did feature the occasional flock of brooding Columbia University students, it was nowhere near as tourist-heavy as other nearby spots. Lush trees, varied flowers, and wooden benches allowed him to briefly forget that he was in a Metropolitan hellscape. He could run away to… for the longest time, he wasn’t sure where. Only now did he realize it was back to Derry, even if that had been the place he was so desperate to escape.

When he spent time in Morningside, he would start off with a run before taking a breather in front of the waterfall, often finishing his time there catching up on e-mails or doing another lap before he returned to work or went home. Except even with his physical therapy and attempts to get fully back into his routine, running like he used to wasn’t yet an option. And as much as he loved the quiet privacy that came with jogging along the trails, the <strike>neurotic</strike> protective part of his brain reminded him of Morningside mugging statistics and that, even if he could run away from a potential attacker, the guy could still catch up to him and take his wallet if he fucking collapsed from some random internal injury a mile ahead.

Thus he settled for more relaxing alternatives. Sitting down at a bench across from the Morningside Waterfall, he started to dig through his bag in search of a book. He had never been that much of a reader, but it was always something he wanted to get into. As he continued to reconnect with his friends and remember his childhood, he supposed a major piece of that desire had to do with his main source of company. After all, Bill had become an author, Mike became a librarian, and Richie read all the time when he was younger and still did. He had even joked about it with Eddie during their conversations, claiming that a certain level of literacy was now required to be a member of the Losers’ Club.

_“And I’m afraid ‘Bridge to Terabithia’ just won’t cut it anymore as the last book you read.”_

_“Fuck you, I’ve read shit since seventh grade—”_

_“Those Judy Blume books don’t count either.”_

_“Hey! Have you even read ‘Deenie’? Blume is fucking profound!”_

Finally his hand emerged, successful in locating the reading material. It was one of Bill’s books; if he was going to be reconnecting with his friends on a more regular basis, it would be nice to be able to say he started looking into who they had been in the twenty-plus years they weren’t together.

It was a massive hardback, a fucking beast of a book in Eddie’s opinion. _Voices from Below_ by Bill Denbrough. The cover seemed to be a callback to the campy horror movie posters they saw all the time at The Capitol Theatre. Bill’s name and the title were embossed and shiny, while the rest of the cover looked like a painting. A man stared out at Eddie from beneath a bed, his eyes wide with terror as a monstrous hand was clamped over his mouth. Prior to his visit to Derry, Eddie would have found the image unsettling. Now, he didn’t even blink before easily flipping to where he had left off.

He only made it through a couple pages (Richie had joked that Bill was making up for years spent stumbling over words by saying _all of them _and Eddie couldn’t disagree) before his phone buzzed. Pulling it from his bag, he <strike>hoped</strike> expected it to be Richie. He hadn’t responded since the photo Eddie had sent of his car being covered in bird shit, something he had figured the man would appreciate. He blamed the issue of time zone differences and instead scolded himself for being initially disappointed at the sight of Mike’s name on the screen. A photo had been sent to the Losers’ group chat and upon opening it, he snorted. The image featured Bill guiltily eyeing what looked like massive bags of sunflower seeds stacked on a kitchen counter. The other figure, quickly identified as Stan, had his back to the camera. But Eddie had no issue reading his friend’s mood as his hands were raised and gesturing in a manner that he could only identify as exasperation. Next to him, a woman had her arms crossed and her head thrown back. Her eyes were scrunched shut and her mouth was open wide, laughing. A message popped up after the image.

_The Roast of Bill Denbrough. He somehow managed to buy hamster food instead of the fancy bird seed Stan asked for. I don’t know if he’ll survive. Will keep you updated._

Several seconds later, Stan replied.

_He had 1 fucking job._

Eddie laughed and started to type. He wished he could find a way down to Atlanta, vacation days be damned.

_For a guy who writes for a living you think he’d be able to read some packaging labels_

Stan’s response was almost instantaneous.

_Exactly!!!!_

Soon enough, the group chat was filled with agreements to his sentiment – including from Beverly and Ben. The latter sent several images of his dog, given the vague reference of pets, who Mike immediately promised to kidnap the next time he was in Omaha. Stan said little more than assurances that he would make Bill pay for his actions, to which said man insisted that the mix-up was an honest mistake brought on by dyslexia and similar food packages. Eddie was quick to point out that Bill didn’t even _have _dyslexia and even if he did, how would that lead to mixing up the words “hamster” and “bird” anyway and—

Stopping Eddie from going further, Ben interrupted to ask after everyone’s plans and general well-being, leading the chat to become something of a round-robin of sharing. Bill and Mike asserted that Stan needed to get the hell out of Atlanta because it was the most humid fucking place they’d ever been. Before Stan’s text bubble could become a message, Bill added that he was to return to Los Angeles again in a couple days_. _Mike was set to continue with his travels, including a plan to visit Eddie the following month. Stan, changing his tune, insisted that the rest of the Losers were due to see him, as texting wasn’t enough and they still needed to meet Patty (who, he promised, was funnier than any of them and should be treated as such). Ben revealed that he and Beverly were planning on heading to his place in Martha’s Vineyard to take his boat out and enjoy the last month of summer. The rest were quick to tease, asking why they hadn’t been invited to join, to which Bev rebuffed with a simple “he likes me best 😉”. Eddie huffed out a laugh and shook his head. After several unexplainable emoji combinations were sent in response, the texts slowed and each signed off with the assurance that they’d be in touch again soon. It felt nice to know that that would actually be true.

Eddie absently scrolled back to the beginning of the chat, reexamining the image Mike had sent. So that was Patty. He didn’t know what he had expected of Stan’s wife. He remembered back in high school the crush he had had on Sigourney Weaver after Richie had forced the group to have a double feature of the first two _Alien _movies at his house. The dark curls were probably the closest he could see to a resemblance. Then again, he doubted that Stan was trying to recreate his adult relationships around the crushes he had as a preteen. Instead, he tapped Stan’s name and began to craft a separate message.

_So Patty’s funnier than the rest of us? You know you have to give me some examples._

Another laugh escaped him when he saw how quickly a typing bubble appeared in response. Even with how quiet Stan could be compared to the rest of the group, it was clear he had a lot to say where Patty was concerned. But before Eddie could see Stan’s message, his phone began to vibrate and the chat was replaced with Richie’s contact photo. It was an old picture, one that Mike had found in a yearbook when he was clearing out his space above the library. It wasn’t particularly flattering; even the faded colors of the printed page couldn’t lessen the loud print of yet another tacky button-down – this one featuring hot pink flamingos and little margaritas – or hide the shiny adhesive tape holding his glasses together. His hair was longer and more unkempt, as Eddie remembered him trying to grow it out during their sophomore year. He seemed to be laughing in the photo and as the camera clicked, his head was thrown back, revealing a nasty bogey in this nose. Richie was almost proud of it, thanking Mike for sending him the image that was to become his new Twitter profile pic. Eddie made a point to express his disgust.

He slotted his phone to his ear. “Hey, Trashmouth.”

“Oh God, don’t call me that.” Richie groaned, “Only weird Twitter fans call me that.”

“Right. I don’t want people getting the idea that I’m a fan of your’s.”

“Exactly,” Richie yawned. “You losers woke me up. How many fucking texts did you send? I thought a ghost turned on my vibrating dildo.”

Eddie laughed, not even bothering to try and hide the noise. He really did find Richie funny, especially when he leaned away from his usual “I fucked your mom” routine.

“Isn’t it like noon there?”

“What’s your point, Eduardo? It’s Saturday. What time did you get up?”

“Well, I wanted to go for a run, so I got up at—”

Loud retched noises interrupted him and Eddie rolled his eyes.

“Get a new bit. You puke so much that faking it doesn’t even have an impact.”

“Fair enough. Next time, I’ll just hang up. How was the run? Back to Kasp-track speed?”

Eddie paused. He was surprised Richie remembered the nickname. After his mother had finally given in and allowed Eddie to join the school’s track team, Richie had made a point to come to all of Eddie’s meets. It wasn’t as if Derry had many rivals to race against, but other schools from surrounding towns like Chamberlain and Chester’s Mill would occasionally come to compete, and Richie was always in the stands to cheer Eddie on and trash talk the other boys. He could sometimes coerce Bill or Stan to come along, but mostly Richie was alone – stomping on the stands and screaming his own makeshift cheer of “Let’s go, Kasp-track!” until he was inevitably shoved into his seat by some older kids.

Eddie didn’t even remember those meets until Richie said that.

“It was pretty good. Still not as fast as I used to be. Forget the fucking hole in my chest. My knees feel like they’re about to burst! God, I miss being twenty.”

“Me too! What a time to be alive. No direction in life, you’re working jobs you hate, dating people that you’ll hate years later, and if you’re from Derry, you’ve forgotten your entire childhood because of an interdimensional killer clown.”

“Yeah.” Eddie’s eyes fell to the book in his lap. A memory of Pennywise came to mind; the massive clown crouched before him, toying with his unbroken arm until Bill and Richie arrived. It turned to face his friends and in doing so, pressed It’s gloved hand over his face. He could feel that it didn’t have normal fingers beneath the fabric. It was something bumpy and gnarled and wet, ready to burst from the seams and clamp over his mouth at any moment. Eddie felt like he was looking into his own eyes on the cover.

He swallowed. “Good times. What are you up to today anyway? Finally going to write something yourself?”

“In your honor, Eds,” Richie said, quickly slipping into a Voice – a high Southern drawl akin to a bayou hillbilly. “I can make you laugh quicker than a gator can bite your pleasure pump.”

Eddie started to laugh, his nose scrunched up in disgust. He could practically hear Richie smiling at his success.

They continued to talk for what seemed like hours, discussing their careers, their cities’ respective summer heats, Eddie’s annoying office mate who left the microwave a mess, Richie’s anecdote on how he ran into Andy Samberg at a Trader Joe’s. And all the while, Eddie became more aware of how the call started. Richie had seen all the group messages but didn’t reply to any of them. Instead, he called Eddie. None of the other Losers. Just him. He wanted to act like he didn’t know how he felt about the realization, but he knew that was a lie. It felt good. Special. Even with the guilt that came with feeling chosen out of their friends to be reached out to, the positivity overrode. And besides, much of their childhood had been like that. Even though he always called Bill his best friend and Richie had called Stan his, the two of them always seemed to exist as a unit. Separately, it was “The poor Kaspbrak boy” and “That loudmouth Tozier kid”. But together, even with all the Losers, they were RichieandEddie. It made sense for Richie to call him. But even though they had been interacting like this pretty much every day since Richie first asked about sliced mangoes, Eddie hadn’t forgotten the last time they spoke in person. After he had hugged a very hung-over Richie goodbye and watched him wander into JFK, his mind still clung to that moment in his hallway where they both admitted to missing the other. He tried to stop himself from thinking about it most of the time, not because he didn’t like the memory, but because he knew there was something he was willfully missing.

As he brought himself back in to Richie’s rant about Bill’s most recent book, the man was interrupted by a loud series of beeps. Eddie pulled his phone away from his ear to look at the screen.

_Low Battery: 10% of battery remaining_

“Ah, shit. Rich, my phone’s about to die.”

“So plug it in, dumbass. That’s what chargers are for.”

“I can’t. I’m at the park. I gotta’ let you go.”

“Oh.” Richie was quiet. “Well, that’s okay. I should get going anyway. Got errands and adult shit.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Bye Richie.”

“Bye Eddie Spaghetti.”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “I hate it when you call me that.”

Richie made kissing noises and slipped into a Victorian-style Voice. “Very well. Sir Edward, it is. Farewell, Sir Edward. Until we meet again. May the sun shine upon your blessed face, may the stars—”

Richie’s monologue was abruptly cut off and Eddie looked to his screen to find the image urging him to plug his phone in to hear the rest of it. That was probably for the best. Eddie shook his head and smiled as he put his phone into his pocket. He looked down at his watch, unsurprised to see it was nearly six. 

The sun was far from setting, but Eddie had been out all day and was ready to get home. Getting up from the bench, he stretched and yawned, feeling the muscles strain from his run earlier that day. The sensation of his skin tugging around his scar had become less unsettling as time went on.

He returned his book to his bag and looped the strap over his shoulder before beginning his walk. Deep green leaves rustled above his head and the sound was interspersed with evening birds calling out to one another. A quiet hum of activity settled over the air as other visitors began to pack up their things to return home.

He had never shared Morningside Park with Myra. Nature was full of animals with diseases, plants that caused allergies, homeless people that slept on the benches, and didn’t Eddie know how dangerous those bums were? It would be better if he stayed in his office for lunch and came straight home. His mother had said similar things when he would play down at the Barrens or in the fields by the train tracks. The world outside was too dangerous for their poor, fragile, little Eddie-bear.

At first, Eddie would agree, and he would come home from the Barrens/Morningside to his mother/Myra, and she would wrap him in a too-tight embrace, asking softly how his day was, but never really listening. He would say he was tired and go to his room, making sure his door was shut before he dug out the comic books he’d hidden in a box beneath his bed. Adventure stories and superhero sagas where the characters were daring and brave, gallivanting around mysterious lands with their trusty sidekicks. Stuff he was already growing out of when he had plucked them from the Friends of Derry Library sale, and stuff he was definitely too old to read as an adult. But these characters had everything, so he never minded reading their same stories over and over again. For a brief moment, he could slip into his favorite characters’ shoes, and sneak past his mother and Myra when he had to meet up with friends and colleagues after school and work. As soon as the door was shut behind him, the world opened up and he was free.

He had never felt that sensation walking through Morningside before. He smiled the whole way home. 

******

_“Everything you’re saying is valid, but you’re scaring my dick off.”_

-Joey, “Obvious Child”

******

_Wake up. Go for a run <strike>don’t think about how you have to start walking barely two miles in because your lungs feel like they’re going to explode</strike>. Text Richie. Go to work <strike>don’t think about rapid deforestation or climate change as Donna hands you three more packets of data that could have just as easily been e-mailed to you</strike>. Take a lunch break. Text the Losers <strike>and Richie</strike>. Go back to work. Go back to your apartment <strike>don’t have a fucking panic attack at an intersection because you’re convinced you’ll get t-boned again and it’ll be your fault</strike>. Call Richie. Watch TV. Try to read. Try to sleep. <strike>Text Richie until you finally fall asleep.</strike>_

Routine became a major comfort to Eddie that sweltering August, but beyond that his main comfort became Richie. He knew that the other Losers were valuable presences to him too, but talking to them could, at times, remind him of the same ugly jealousy he felt whenever he was at Tozier household for too long. Each of them had an entire life outside of their reclaimed friendships. Bill had writing notoriety, Beverly had her fashion empire, Ben and Stan both had started their own companies, and Mike was taking on all the places he had dreamed of visiting for almost thirty years. What did Eddie have? An office with a shitty view, an assistant that had no problem vaping at her desk, and fifteen e-mails from his ex-wife-to-be questioning every single piece of the divorce papers.

Obviously Richie also seemed to have a life outside of the Losers. Flying all across the country for interviews and dinners spent schmoozing Netflix executives and all the other shit he liked to complain to Eddie about only to laugh when the man put on a whiny voice to express sarcastic sympathy for “the tragic life of stardom”. But for some reason, Eddie didn’t feel as guilty or internally ashamed to be pulling his friend into random discussions. Maybe it was because Richie had been the first to reach out after their argument. Maybe it was simply his overall charm, despite the half dozen dick jokes one had to slog through to see the appeal of such a friendship. Maybe it was the fact that Eddie still suspected that he was the only one that knew that Richie was gay, that even though the information had been revealed in a moment of anger and Eddie had reacted poorly, Richie still wanted to connect with him beyond group interactions. And something about that made him feel special.

Though their topics of conversation were certainly less sacred. They talked about everything from Richie’s theories on the JFK assassination to Eddie’s retelling of the first and last time he smoked weed in college. He would yell at Richie when the man would decide to continue their phone conversation while he used the bathroom and then he would be in stitches ten minutes later when he would try and fail to explain to Eddie what he thought a risk analyst actually did. On occasion, they would allow matters to take a more serious turn.

_“I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about all the infections Stan could get in his wounds. I know he said he and Patty are careful but what if he forgets to change his bandages at one point and touches a door handle some gross GSU frat boy that doesn’t wash his hands touched and then he gets sick or can’t use his hands after what he did for all of us and then—”_

_“Do I suck for seeing that photo of him he sent for his contact pic and thinking he didn’t look depressed? Like… I know that doesn’t mean a fucking thing, but I saw how good he looked and I keep thinking about how he must have been so fucking happy before Mike called all of us. And I feel even more shitty because I keep thinking “at least I wasn’t the one that called him, so I don’t have that on my conscience”, like I’m happy that I don’t have Mike’s guilt but at least Mike’s gone to see him—”_

_“I nearly broke my fucking neck today because I still can’t close my shower. It even has an actual glass door instead of a curtain but I can’t stop picturing Bowers opening it up and putting a hole in my other cheek. So now I keep soaking my floors, no matter how many towels and bathmats I put down, so I’m either going to lose my security deposit or crack my head open on the toilet.” _

_“You know I wore contacts when I went to college? Only contacts. I kept having nightmares about someone smashing my face in and breaking the frames into my eyes and going fucking blind. Remember when Bowers threatened to do that in elementary school? How fucked is it that I remember that? Most people our age can’t remember tons of stuff from elementary school. Now it’s like my brain found a storage unit of repression on auction and decided to buy it, bust it open, and show my memory lane camera crew all sorts of forgotten trauma. Anyway, I had to start wearing glasses again a couple years ago because I’m so goddamn near-sighted. Just in time for big ass frames to go out of fashion again.”_

_“Do you really think it’s all over? For real, this time? I know we all forgot everything after we left and we still remember each other now, but what if this is another trick? What if we’re still in Derry and It’s fucking with us and any second we’re going to see that leper or the clown or some other nightmare bullshit?”_

_“Every time I wake up, the first thing I do is list your guys’ names. ‘Cause then I know that I remember you, that you all still exist, and that everything that happened actually happened.”_

Even within their deeper discussions, they never got into their fight or Richie’s coming out. There were many times where Eddie could feel his skin twitch with the need to ask Richie a thousand questions: if he had told any of the other Losers, how come he waited so long to say anything, why did he try to kiss _him_, of all people? But anytime he started to ask, the image of absolute misery that was Richie’s face in that bathroom in Maine came roaring into his mind, and he quickly changed the subject.

And if Eddie were to be totally honest, his refusal to bring up any of his questions came from a somewhat selfish desire to not have the interrogation turned back on him. Richie pressing for details about why he had married Myra when she was such a clear parallel to the relationship he had with his mother. About why he didn’t call her until he had landed in New York instead of after he’d been discharged from the hospital like he told the Losers he had. Why he decided impulsively, stupidly, irrationally, to refill his travel bags with more things while Myra was out and check into a hotel room.

If Eddie could barely answer those questions for himself, how was he meant to explain any of it to Richie?

Then again, he probably would have preferred struggling to articulate his choices to his friend over Myra’s eventual confrontation. He had taken preventatives measures: blocking her number, arriving and leaving work at irregular hours, avoiding his usual dining spots. Eddie knew it was a shitty thing to do, but he needed time to clear his head. And the month he had spent with her after returning from Derry was, to him, even worse than leaving.

Her usual grilling session after this particular “business trip” was far more intense than previous ones. It was like she knew he was lying, even when he had made a point to hide everything - plane tickets, hospital bills, the huge fucking scars (the last of which had been the easiest to conceal, given their less than stellar sex life and wasn’t that another goddamn red flag?). Before Mike’s phone call, he found himself faced with two options. Either giving in to her constant questioning and surveillance or pushing back in the least effective of ways; getting into passive aggressive silent treatment battles or screaming matches, whichever one made them both the most miserable.

Myra had tried her usual tactics as soon as he stepped into their dimly lit foyer at the exact hour he promised he would be home. She started with snide questions, the same ones she brought up when he had left for Derry. Why did his company need him to make such a short notice trip anyway? Did they even have a branch in Maine? From there, she started to get angry, making accusations about who he could be meeting, why it was so sudden, how her sister had suggested the possibility of an affair or money-laundering or worse – all of which she brushed off, _of course_, Eddie. When none of that worked, she laid into panic. She had been so worried while he was gone. She thought his plane had crashed or that he got into an accident in some defective rental car or that he had gotten sick while he was away and didn’t have their insurance information and thus couldn’t get treatment—

To her frustration though, Eddie did not engage. He shrugged and gave vague, one-word answers. She tried screaming, ignoring, guilting, crying, and even threatening him, but to no avail. The Eddie Kaspbrak who returned from Maine was different.

He could tell she didn’t like that at all.

Still, he stayed longer than he probably should have. Old habits die hard, even after admitting there was a habit in the first place. There were moments in that sad little house where it would be easier to sink into the heavy silence, the bickering, the routines. Myra would ask him the same questions about work, make the same dinners, gossip on the phone with same friends, sit down and watch the same TV dramas. Then he would drive the same way to work, eat lunch in his office, call Myra at the same time to tell her he was about to head home. It was like he never went back to Derry. All the memories he regained, the friendships rekindled, the life he almost lost didn’t matter. The fight with Richie. He could pretend like nothing ever happened.

Then Richie texted him about those goddamn mangoes and Eddie was twelve again, yelling at him for not understanding basic nutrition. He stayed up so late that night texting and laughing, he missed his alarm the next morning. Myra had been forced to wake him, something that came with an unspoken “What would you do without me?” that churned his stomach. Returning from work that night, he found a Post-it stuck to the fridge, announcing that she would be having dinner with some friends and that there was some leftover pasta in the fridge. He went to pack, not even changing out of his suit before he left.

_Missed Calls – Myra: 14 Missed Calls. Voicemail – Myra: 5 Voicemails. 39 Messages from Myra._

_“Eddie, where are you? Your office said you left for the day, but no one else has seen you. Please answer.”_

_“Eddie, are you alright? You’re not answering my messages. I’m close to calling the police and filing a missing person’s report. Call me back—”_

_“Eddie, come home. I’m worried sick. Please, sweetheart!” _

After a few days in a hotel room, his phone began to ring again and he finally willed himself to pick up. There were plenty of sobs (some genuine, most not), many threats (all empty but startling nonetheless) but Eddie once again remained calm, repeating the planned statements he had written out on his computer for this express purpose. She would be served the divorce papers by the weekend. No, he would not be changing his mind. She didn’t have to worry about the house or her car or any such thing, as he didn’t plan on trying to take those from her. He suspected she would probably try to petition for alimony, but he didn’t dare consider that right then. Instead, he hung up after he lost count of her warnings that he had “better get a damn good lawyer” and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. He breathed a sigh of relief. Or was it exhaustion? He wasn’t sure.

Eddie couldn’t remember the last time he did something that insane. Stabbing Bowers through a shower curtain came pretty close. But he supposed it would have made more sense to fantasize about stabbing your childhood bully than it did to spend hours at a time imagining the process of divorcing the woman you were supposed to love and cherish so long as you both shall live. If he had been clearer headed, he could have recognized that the initiating event in his departure had come from Richie’s text. But he ignored his friend’s involvement, focusing on the reality of countless signs, so many things utterly wrong with their marriage that he couldn’t ignore anymore. The text from Richie was nothing more than a grain of sand in the hourglass that had been counting down to the end of his and Myra’s union.

Eddie never thought of himself as brave. Not when he had gone into the Neibolt House with Bill and Richie. Not when they’d taken on Pennywise – the first or second time. Not even when he had managed to fling the fire poker into that clown’s gaping maw. But as he cast his gaze over the expanse of his tiny apartment and became aware of how there were no enormous scented candles or fake bronze ornaments or random pieces of furniture he’d been coerced into buying, he did feel less afraid.

******

_“I’m having a heart attack. Get back to work.”_

-Captain Seth Dozerman, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”

******

As he locked his apartment door behind him, Eddie quickly worked to shed the stresses of the day from his person. He put his shoes into the closet, tossed his sweaty blazer into the hamper (because fuck New York summers), loosened his tie, and pulled his phone from his pocket. He didn’t even look at the device as his fingers went through the familiar motions, hitting Richie’s contact from the recent call list.

_Hey, this is Richie Tozier. Don’t leave me a message; I’ll never look at it. Text me like a normal person. Or if you want to fax me, my number is ..._

Eddie hung up. The fax number did work, as it turned out. He was curious about the possibility of Richie owning a fax machine and decided to send something as a test. He answered his phone an hour later to Richie howling with laughter as he informed him that the fax number was actually to his agent, who was kind enough to give Richie the poorly drawn middle finger that his friend had sent.

His phone buzzed before he could put it back in his pocket.

_Hey sorry_ _stuck in a stupid production meeting can’t talk now. Call u later tonight?_

Eddie smiled. _Sure. Enjoy your comedy circle jerk._

_Don’t worry bud. I’ll bring you to the next one and make sure they show you a good time _😉

Eddie laughed and tossed his phone over to the sofa. Usually he talked to Richie right after work, but he could stand to wait a while. Hell, he’d probably manage to get shit done that he had been putting off. And when he called later that night, Eddie could tell him about everything he was able to do without Richie distracting him with ramblings about surfer culture and his fascination with the concept of secret menus or whatever it was he felt like talking about that day. Heading into his bedroom, he exchanged his suit for a t-shirt and shorts. The laundry basket was lifted onto his hip and he brought it to the washer and dryer to start a load. After some trial and error with the machine, he heard the cycle start.

He returned to the living room, admittedly feeling a little… he wasn’t quite sure. He’d accomplished a task he had been putting off, primarily due to his lack of familiarity with the devices in his new apartment. Then again, he wasn’t really familiar with washers and dryers period. His mom eventually had him start going to the laundromat when he was old enough to drive there (though that was only allowed because her fear of Eddie having an allergic reaction to fabric softener was overridden by her reluctance to leave the house) and he had done his own laundry in college, but once he moved in with Myra, she insisted on bringing all of their clothes to a drycleaner. How long had it been since he had washed his own clothes? Shit, maybe he wouldn’t brag about getting that task done when Richie called.

He sank into the sofa and clicked on the television. That was something he managed to figure out since moving into his new place; pushing furniture into designated spots and hooking his television up with streaming services that Richie had turned him to. And honestly, thank God for that, because he didn’t want to try and navigate the situation of resetting his cable after he had just sorted out the bill for his old place being sent to Myra.

He clicked through various Netflix options, pausing on each to allow a preview.

_You have no idea what it means to have nothing. You don’t value what we have achieved. I have had to fight for everything my entire life–_

Click.

_In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories._

Click.

_Mark and Salma have a budget of $450,000 and are looking for their dream home. This happy couple has been married for twenty years, with two beautiful daughters off in college. As empty nesters, looking to keep the kindle of their romance strong, we need to make sure this space helps them stay connected._

Click.

Sighing, Eddie turned off the television and went to get his book from his bag. He’d gotten further in it since his attempt to read in the park, and the story was picking up. He’d even texted Bill some of his thoughts. But the concern of what would happen to the protagonist by the following chapter or if he would have to lie to Bill about liking the ending wasn’t enough to occupy his mind. He couldn’t stay focused; his eyes and mind kept drifting away from the pages and into thoughts of production meetings and interrupted routines and how sweet little sixty-year-olds were excited to keep their marriage alive based on whether they went with hardwood or tile for their kitchen, which was a stupid debate as tile was the way to go—

He set the book aside. Brown eyes flicked rapidly about the apartment. When he had lived with Myra, he remembered how cramped everything felt. Overstuffed plush furniture, dozens of random “accent pieces”, candles and jars of potpourri on every surface. Everything was so tight and pressed, he felt like he couldn’t breathe, and he tried to avoid being home whenever he could. Now, even with the whole apartment being basically the size of one floor in their townhouse (_her _townhouse, it was _her’s _now—), all of it felt too big. The high ceilings, the lack of furniture, nothing in the place beyond his clothes and the food in his fridge suggested anyone even lived there. For a brief moment, he wondered if he even did.

_If you lived here, you’d be home by now._

Instantly, Eddie felt his throat tighten. He wheezed, his hand coming up to grip his chest. Fuck, he couldn’t breathe, he was going to suffocate alone in his apartment and no one would even know until his neighbors complained about a smell. He dug through his bag once more, fumbling for his inhaler. In, out. In, out. The familiar medicinal taste provided more comfort than he would have liked to admit, and a teenage girl’s voice wormed into his ear.

_You know it’s all bullshit, right? Your medication?_

Why the fuck did he do this!? He divorced the woman he had been married to for ten years – _ten years! _That was a quarter of his life! He threw away that whole relationship for what? Because he went to Maine and remembered his childhood and nearly died? So fucking what!? He hadn’t even thought about his childhood since he and his mom moved to Poughkeepsie—

_Except every July, when he couldn’t even leave his house and he couldn’t explain why. Don’t those balloons look familiar, girly boy? Don’t you want a balloon?_

—and that had been fine! Hell, Myra didn’t know a thing about his childhood and she had still wanted him to propose. She’d still wanted to live with him and build up a life with him and he’d fucking peaced out because he was—he was—

He needed to get out. He jumped to his feet, grabbed his keys, and barely managed to fully pull his shoes on before he was out the door. Down and out of his apartment, past the nearest subway entrance, past the overpriced tourist trap café, past kids skateboarding, shouting and laughing like nothing could possibly be wrong with the world. His sneakers slapped against the burning pavement, propelling him forward faster than he had gone in weeks.

_Eddie runs quite fast. He runs quite fast when you’re not here._

Where was he even going?

_Quite fast when there’s nobody around to remind him of how delicate he is._

It didn’t fucking matter. He just needed to go. Needed to forget. Because all this shit started because he remembered—

_And I can see in his face, Mrs. Kaspbrak, that he knows – even now at age [thirty] nine he knows – that the biggest favor in the world he could do himself would be to run fast in any direction you’re not going._

He’d been so good at it when he was younger. He’d been one of the best. He could hear Richie’s cracked, puberty-stricken voice cheering him on. _Let’s go, Kasp-Track! Let’s go!_

_Let him go, Mrs. Kaspbrak. Let him run!_

It was always so easy. It was always an escape. Like his comic books and his action figures and his friends. The friends that always seemed to be running beside them, laughing and joking and struggling to catch their breath—

_I d-don’t get how you’ve got asthma, E-E-Eddie. You always b-beat us to the ice cream sh-sh-shop and hardly break a sweat._

He couldn’t explain it. He supposed he could have, if he really thought about it. If he sat down and truly considered why it was it felt like an elephant was sitting on his chest every time he heard a frantic _Eddie Bear _cut across the house or when Mr. Keene stared down at him through those massive goddamn glasses, but he never did. All he knew was that he could finally fucking _breathe _around his friends and not—

_Eddie, what were you thinking!? Don’t you lie to me, I saw you running around with Bill and that farm boy. Do you know how filthy that place is? It’s covered in blood and manure and Lord knows what else—_

The pounding of his sneakers on the sidewalk was replaced with the sound of his heart pounding in his ears as he slowed to a stop. Resting his hands on his hips, Eddie allowed himself a moment to take in his surroundings. The sun was starting to set over the Queensboro Bridge. As the glare of the metal began to burn his eyes, forcing him to turn away, only then did he notice the pain. Fuck, it felt like his chest was about to cave in. Jesus—

He stepped further from the center of the path, leaning against the concrete wall that separated him from Roosevelt Island below. He couldn’t catch his breath. He had completely blown off everything his doctor had said and now his lungs were bound to collapse, and he’d be on the morning news for randomly dying on the Queensboro Bridge. What had he been even running from anyway? His empty apartment? His imagined memories of his ex-wife and his mother? Goddamn it, he was always running from _something_, wasn’t he!?

A familiar chime cut through his heaving breaths. Grabbing blindly at his pocket, Eddie retrieved his phone and was met with a familiar, snot-nosed image. It took three tries to hit the ‘accept’ button.

“You would not _believe _the day I’ve had. These fucking twenty-year-olds think they’re the second son of God or—”

“Richie,” Eddie interrupted, “Richie, I can’t breathe.”

“Okay, drama queen. Just because I jumped in without a “hello” doesn’t mean I didn’t give you time to breathe.”

“No!” Eddie gasped, allowing his legs to give out from under him and sliding down the concrete wall, “I think I’m having— I’m having a heart attack.”

“Oh my God! Shit, what’s going on?” Richie asked. Some rustling and movement cut into the line. “Talk to me, man.”

Eddie clutched desperately at his chest. If he’d been able to focus on anything but the weird familiarly sensation of what felt like claws ripping at his torso, he would have agreed with Richie’s consideration of him being a drama queen. “Went for a run. Chest hurts. Can’t breathe.”

“Do you have your inhaler on you?”

“Wh-What?”

“Do you have your fucking inhaler?”

Willing his hand from his chest, Eddie rooted around his pockets. “Fuck, fuck!”

“Eds, if you don’t have it, call an ambulance or something—”

“No!”

Richie’s silence sent another stitch of panic through Eddie’s chest. Because even with his fear of being labelled as the John Doe of Roosevelt Island, he was suddenly far more concerned with the possibility of having to explain to Richie that he didn’t want to call an ambulance to potentially save his pathetic little life because if he did, his insurance wouldn’t help pay for what would end up being his fifth false alarm ambulance ride he had taken that year. He didn’t want to have to look another nurse in the eyes as she kindly reminded him with a hint of condescension that the last doctor he had spoken to told him to start seeing a psychiatrist, that he needed to find a way to manage his stress that didn’t lead him to thinking that he was having a stroke every time little things in his day-to-day got to be too much.

“—you fucking answer me, Eddie!”

Instantly, he was yanked back to the present, hyperaware of his gasping breaths, the sounds of cars passing by, and Richie’s worried voice shouting in his ear. He didn’t answer immediately, doing his best to instead focus on his organs, remembering what one of the many EMTs he had encountered told him to do. Picture his lungs as pumps, inflating and deflating. In, out, in, out—

_He was out. He was free. No longer stuck inside—_

“I think…” Eddie willed himself to speak, interrupting himself with a rough cough, “I think I’m okay.”

“Jesus Christ,” Richie groaned, though Eddie could still hear the relief in his tone, “Where are you? Are you sure you don’t want me to call you an ambulance?”

Eddie let out a weak huff of laughter.

“What’s so goddamn funny, moron? I thought I was going to have to listen to you die like that fucking _Twilight Zone _episode.”

Eddie chuckled a little more. “You live in L.A. How would you manage to call an ambulance for New York?”

  
“I don’t… well…” Richie stuttered over his response, “Whatever. I saw it on TV once. Doesn’t matter. I would have found a way for you. Especially because that sounded fucking serious. I know a lot of the crap you toted around when we were kids was bullshit, but you never sounded like that during an asthma attack. You need to see a doctor or something.”

Eddie instinctively shook his head. “I probably pushed myself too hard. My doctor said himself that I likely wouldn’t be able to quite run like I used to. I guess this is what happens when you disobey doctor’s orders. Always wanted to try doing that.”

He waited for Richie to laugh, make some comment about “Eddie Bear being such a bad boy”, but the next statement was unexpectedly solemn.

“Why were you running like that if your doctor said it would hurt you?”

Eddie swallowed. Because what could he say? That he felt like his apartment was going to swallow him up? That he was so pathetic that he could barely manage to do laundry on his own and had a meltdown when Richie didn’t immediately talk to him when he called?

“It’s not like I meant to. Thought I could push it to something more than a granny’s powerwalk speed and apparently, I can’t.”

He heard Richie cluck his tongue through the line and instantly, they were back to jokes. “Guess you’ll have to turn in your letterman jacket, Kasp-Track.”

“Guess so.”

There was a pause. Richie cleared his throat. “I’m glad you’re okay though.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Eddie’s mouth. “Yeah, me too.”

“No shit. And you definitely owe me, now that I’ve saved your mortal body and soul,” Richie effortlessly slipped into a Voice. “You must listen to my tale of woe; my suffering, onto you, I must bestow.”

Eddie rolled his eyes and laughed. “Alright, Shakespeare. Fill me in.” He eased himself to his feet, gripping the top of the wall to help himself up. After ensuring that he wouldn’t collapse without support, he started to shakily walk back the way he had come.

“It all began with our antagonist, Josh-Mark-Ryan-Frat-Boy-McAsshole. Upon his birth, the Earth’s population responded in turn by gifting all with a Zoloft prescription.”

“This guy probably pointed out the reality of the fact that you’re not funny.”

“Shh,” He hissed, and Eddie couldn’t help the smile that immediately formed at the sound. “Take heed not to interrupt my tale, serf. Or I will be forced to begin, once more, at the beginning.”

As Richie continued to explain the events of his frustrating day, Eddie continued his walk home. The August sun beat down his back as it set, causing the sweat to continue to pour down his face and make his t-shirt stick to him like a second skin. Even so, all that occupied his thoughts was a familiar voice, providing way more comfort than A/C, iced water, or anything else could have in that moment.

******

_“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”_

-Neil Gaiman, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane”

******

“That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”

Bill didn’t even look up from his computer screen as Richie spoke. Ever since returning from Derry (and Atlanta, in his case), the pair had taken it upon themselves to make time for one another. After all, it wasn’t everyday one reconnected with the childhood friends that murdered a nightmarish alien god with you, let alone have it turn out that you lived in the same city. Their interactions often came in the form of getting coffee together, watching football in one of their homes (this quickly fell apart when both revealed that they never became big fans of sports), and Richie interrupting his work to drag Bill to lunch. He didn’t particularly mind the intrusion. He liked his friend, obviously, and as much writing as he needed to get done, he appreciated the distractions that Richie was all too ready to provide.

“You’re telling me that the writer – the man with which the film would not exist – can’t smoke in his own trailer?”

Bill didn’t have the look up to know that Richie was scowling at the plastic sign that was stuck to the wall, stating that smoking was strictly prohibited within the confines of the trailer. The last two times he had come by to interrupt his work, he’d found something to rant about. The first had been how stupidly extravagant it was to have a fireplace in the trailer, and the second was how uncomfortable the bolted-in sofa was.

“It’s 2016, Rich. You can’t smoke in most places. Big part of _The Truth _and all those other anti-smoking campaigns. Besides, it’s not like I own the trailer. They rent it out for the production and once my job is done, I’m out and it goes to someone else on the team or they send it back.”

After post-production for _The Attic Room_ had wrapped, Bill quickly slid into another project. It was a smaller horror anthology flick, not as hefty a paycheck as the previous movie had been, but it was a still something he could create for and enjoy. And as a bonus (though he would never admit it), it kept him out of the house. When he returned from Derry, Audra hadn’t exactly been happy to see him. He couldn’t act like he didn’t understand why. He’d bailed out on the movie without even finishing the rewrites, forcing the studio to find an outside hire to frantically come up with a new ending. He didn’t give Audra any kind of explanation for his departure and didn’t answer any of her worried calls or texts. He only reached out when he was leaving for Atlanta (the first time) and only supplied a vague story about an emergency with some friends and Stan’s suicide attempt. While she had been relatively understanding of his grief, even Bill knew that using Stan’s actions as a means to justify his disappearance was, for lack of a better word, fucked. He came home with flowers and a necklace and an apology, and Audra accepted them all, because that was what they always did. But something told Bill that it didn’t quite cut it this time. So he started to spend more time in a trailer that he didn’t really need, working for a paycheck that he also didn’t need, visiting the Blum-Uris household more times than was probably necessary during the recovery process, all the while becoming more and more aware that Audra was no longer asking when he would be home or checking up on his progress.

“So Big Pharma is banning me from enjoying a cigarette. I thought one of the benefits of becoming famous was being able to do whatever we want.” Richie sighed dramatically, extending his long limbs over the ends of the sofa. Bill caught himself smiling as he typed. Beyond the benefit of his serving as an entertainment, it was nice to see his friend. It was like how they were as kids. Something about Richie’s behavior reminded him not just of leading the Losers onto some kind of frightening adventure but of being a big brother, in a way.

Bill froze. His expression didn’t change, but his fingers stopped flying over the keys. That was the first time thinking of himself as a big brother didn’t feel like a punch in the face.

Oblivious, Richie heaved himself from the sofa to sit down at the table with Bill. It was the only item in the trailer that hadn’t been bolted down, apparently having been brought in at the writer’s request. It was littered with empty coffee cups, pens, loose leaf paper, and a variety of rainbow sticky notes – all covered in Bill’s elegant scrawl. When they’d been in elementary school, he remembered Richie convincing him to write a fake love note to Stan, claiming his handwriting looked enough like a girl’s that they could pretend it was from someone else. Of course, Stan knew it was them, pointing out that it was stupid to try and pull something like that on a friend that would know what Bill’s handwriting looked like.

“If I must continue to suffer in silence—”

Bill found himself drawn from his thoughts quickly enough to reply with a dry “When have you ever done anything silently?”

“If I _must _suffer in silence,” Richie repeated, ignoring the comment, “Can I at least get something to eat? I’m starving.”

“Help yourself.” He gestured towards a mini fridge that sat beneath one of the windows. He returned his gaze to his laptop and, after adjusting his reading glasses, deleted the last eight lines he’d written. Out of the corner of his eye, Richie rolled his shoulders before moving over to the shelf that held the fridge. Just past him, Bill could see out the trailer’s window. The shoot was situated outside of West Hollywood in some abandoned warehouse behind a hill. There wasn’t much to see beyond the few trailers dotted around the building that was being used for shooting. Bill had asked why the project wasn’t going to be shot on a studio set and the director, for her part, at least had the decency not to roll her eyes when she pointed out that such an independent project had to cut production costs when it could. Bill wondered if his ignorance on the matter had to do with his lack of knowledge on the film industry (despite his marriage to someone in said industry) or because of his age. God, people in the movies seemed to be getting younger and younger—

“Uh… Big Bill?”

Forcing his gaze from the window, Bill focused on Richie. “Yeah?”

“The only things in here are a moldy orange and I think an empty water. I know we’re in a drought, man, but you can recycle the bottle. This is a waste of space. You never got into that minimalist movement, did you—”

Bill closed his eyes. “Rich, I love you.”

“But it’s not me, it’s you?”

“Richie—”

“Yeah, yeah. Alright, I let you continue your Jack Torrance impression in peace. But in exchange, my silence must be bought with pho.”

Bill raised an eyebrow, though he failed to keep the smile from his face. “I think it’s pronounced ‘fuh’.”

“It could be pronounced ‘pee-ho’ for all I care. I want some noodles and that Thai tea that’s so sweet it makes me teeth want to crawl out of my head and rot away from the rest of my mouth. Hey, that could be something for your script—”

“Rich. Thirty minutes, that’s all I need.”

“Yeah, got it.” Richie mimed zipping his lips before returning to the couch. Bill eyed him for a moment and once he saw him pull his phone from his pocket, he let his eyes fall back to his laptop and became once more engrossed with trying not to produce a shitty ending.

Just as he was wrapping up the beginning of the final act, Bill looked to the corner of his screen and was surprised to find that almost forty-five minutes have passed. He reverted his gaze to the sofa, expecting to see Richie feigning a starvation death or outright gone, having gotten sick of waiting for Bill to get out of his head. Instead, the man was grinning madly as he typed into his phone. For a moment, he thought about asking who he was talking to, only to quickly brush the thought aside. If it had been one of the Losers, his phone would have gone off as well. He was probably texting some comedy friend or one of his writers. Or literally anyone else. Because, unlike Bill, Richie had friends beyond the five they shared and hadn’t recently come to the realization that he had almost no companions now that his wife was no longer inviting him out with her.

He removed his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose. Fuck, he couldn’t go down that road again. He needed to focus. Richie was literally _right there_, ready to go to lunch with him! He had friends, he had people. He had Richie, Eddie, Bev, Ben, Stan, _Mikey_—

“You done penning your nightmares there?”

Bill opened his eyes. Richie tapped his phone one more time before putting it back into his pocket. He schooled his face back into neutrality.

“Yeah. Did you have a pho place in mind?”

They drove over the hill to a restaurant that Richie frequented, promising that it was one of the few places in Hollywood where the people didn’t care who you were so long as you shut up, eat, and pay. Said man drove, much to Bill and everyone on the road’s horror. It’s not that Richie was a bad driver, per se. He understood the laws of the road, he put his signal on when he turned, he yielded when going left. But he sped like a bat out of hell and was determined to get to their destination in half the time any GPS claimed it would take.

“Jesus Christ,” Bill hissed. They barely squeezed by a truck, merging into a lane by a hair. The truck honked repeatedly and Richie let out a laugh.

“Don’t be a pussy. There was plenty of room.”

“No wonder you were the last one to get your license.”

“That eye test was fucking rigged, man. I swear!”

The place ended up sandwiched between a laundromat and a convenience store and had the curb appeal of a run-down funeral parlor. The sign was faded, as was the handwritten menus, yet the place was packed. Walking past a sign urging them to seat themselves, the pair weaved through various tables before sliding into a booth by the window. After a waiter took their orders and provided them with Richie’s requested Thai tea (the man was right – Bill was certain he’d have to explain the sudden appearance of cavities during his next dentist visit), they began to discuss the specifics behind Bill’s most recent project – his section of the film was rooted in a short story he had written that never made it into his last anthology, feeling it was a little too “hoity-toity” for the rest of the collection.

“And no one likes to be talked down to when they’re reading horror.” Bill asserted. He took another sip of the tea before washing it down with some water.

“I’ll bet you know all about that, Mister ‘350 Million Copies Sold’.” Richie smirked, pulling the cup of tea to his side of the booth. Bill didn’t try to stop him.

“There’s a reason I’ve sold that many. It’s because I’m not acting like my work is some fancy, deep-level, philosophical shit. They’re just stories. Things to enjoy, to be scared by.” Bill toyed absently with his straw, “I had the same kind of argument in college, you know. I flunked my first big creative writing workshop because I got sick of everybody talking about how they were going to be the next big Hemingway or Fitzgerald or whatever, and I really only wanted to write stories people would enjoy.”

“Like when we were kids.”

Bill looked properly at Richie. His own Thai tea was empty, and he had started on the one Bill abandoned. “When we were kids, you loved telling stories. It never felt like some kind of attempt to be deep or have some self-imposed therapy. Just that you liked telling stories.”

Bill allowed a small smile. “I just wanted attention.”

Richie let out a laugh. “Guess we’re in the same boat on that one, Big Bill.”

His giggling was cut short by the arrival of their meals. Both allowed themselves to be caught up in eating and sharing expressions of how good the food was. Only when he was halfway through his noodles did Richie pipe up again.

“Is it weird,” He asked, “Writing horror after everything?”

Bill glanced up from his bowl. Setting aside his chopsticks, he considered the question.

“Yeah. But not like how you’d think.” He watched Richie mimic his actions and wipe his mouth on a napkin, ready to give Bill all his attention. “Before Mike called, everything I wrote felt like second nature. I used to tell journalists that I didn’t know where my stories came from. And to be honest, I really didn’t. Audra insisted that they came from my dreams, but only because she would wake up to me crying in my sleep or rolling around in bed. But I could never remember anything, not even bad feelings. I just thought that I was crazy creative.” He laughed without humor and ran a hand through his hair. “I guess some deep, recessed part of myself held onto everything that happened to us. Now… the creativity is still there, but I definitely can’t act like I don’t know where the ideas come from.” His eyes fell to his palm, where the scar from their promise no longer resided. “And I don’t sleep as well, that’s for sure.”

“Amen to that.” Richie said, quieter than he had been since he arrived at Bill’s trailer.

A minute of silence passed, both lost in their own memories.

“Did you ever think of the others?” Bill looked up to meet Richie’s eyes, hesitant to be the first to speak. “You know, before Mike called?”

“You mean in the twenty-seven years that that fucking clown took my childhood from me? Can’t say I had the luxury.” Bill didn’t have a chance to consider the bitterness in the man’s tone before he’d plastered a goofy smile on his face. “I mean… sure, sometimes I’d remember little things. Like hanging out in the clubhouse or playing at the arcade, but every time I’d try to latch onto a name or a face, it’d just kind of… I don’t know, slip away. Why? Did you?”

Bill shook his head. “But I think… I m-mean—” He sighed and paused. His stuttering had largely faded after leaving Derry, but he still caught himself stumbling over words if certain matters of the past came up. “Mike. He was there. He stayed behind.”

Richie titled his head. “Yeah, he did. Why? That have something to do with it?”

Bill shifted in his seat. How was he supposed to say that the thing he felt the most guilty about in all of this wasn’t that they had all forgotten each other, that Stan and Eddie had almost died, that he had lost the memory of the brother he loved, but that <strike>he</strike> they had left Mike alone in Derry with the knowledge of what had happened while <strike>he</strike> they had gone off to greener pastures?

“No. I just wish he hadn’t had to stay behind.”

Richie opened his mouth to speak. Probably some stupid joke about his statement being gay or just a sarcastic “yeah, no shit” that Bill would force himself to laugh at. But his words were cut off by the return of the waiter, refilling their drinks and asking if their food was alright. Both allowed their attention to be drawn away from the past and instead began to discuss the mundane. They talked about how Richie refused to get behind the pressed juice trend, about how Bill wished the city had a stronger “book culture”, about how complaining about traffic was essentially a required topic nowadays. Bill appreciated to simplicity of it, if only because he rarely got to have such conversations in the first place. Perhaps what he was most thankful for was Richie’s obliviousness to the topic of spouses, choosing instead to talk about Bill’s most recent bout of travel, rather than Audra – as others may have felt compelled to do.

“How’s Stan? I’ve called him and shit, but you’ve actually _seen him _seen him. How is he really?” Richie finished off the last of their egg rolls, wiping the oil on his jeans. 

Bill shrugged. “He’s Stan. Same old man type he was when we were kids. Grouchy, watches birds, does jigsaw puzzles for fun.” He dug his wallet out of his pocket. “I will say though, I don’t think I have ever seen him smile as much as he did when we were there, and it had nothing to do with Mike and me. That was all Patty. Seriously. That woman lights him up like nothing I’ve ever seen.

Richie grinned. He seemed to share Bill’s belief that if anyone deserved someone like that, it was Stan the Man.

“Beyond that, I think he’s improving.” Bill continued. “He didn’t talk about it much. Patty filled us in on the details. He’s got a regular therapist now and he’s on some meds. He was just starting to go back to work when Mike and I visited the second time. He’s even volunteering as a math tutor at the school Patty teaches at.”

As Bill gave Richie the briefest of explanations of what Stan had been up to over the past three months, a memory began to make its way to the forefront of his mind. Maybe it was how intensely Richie was staring at him. Or maybe it was the fact that he was talking about Stan to Richie at all, but even as his mouth ran away with a vague account of Stan’s improved OCD coping mechanisms, he found that his brain had sent him back to their senior year of high school.

_It was the night of their homecoming dance. It was the first one they ever actually attended; they had planned on going to the previous two. But Beverly had been forced to move in with her aunt their sophomore year and the group instead spent the evening breaking root beer bottles with Richie’s pellet gun to distract Bill from the “forced break-up”. Junior year, Ben’s mom found a job in Texas that earned her enough money to move out of her sister’s place and then some. The remaining Losers spent what would end up being their last night in the Clubhouse, looking at the spots on the wall that used to sport Ben’s posters. They’d initially planned on skipping their final homecoming dance entirely, but all of their parents insisted that they go to at least one, that they would regret not having those memories. Bill supposed that was just another drop in the pool of cosmic irony. They all reluctantly agreed, tacking on the promise that they would get to spend the following day with Mike._

_Bill had not expected to get a date. But Katie Matthews asked him in Home Ec and he couldn’t say no, could he? Guys like him never got asked to shit like this, it just didn’t happen. He expected his friends to be miffed that he was looking to spend the evening with a girl over them, but they were all preoccupied with another matter entirely._

_Since the summer of their senior year, Eddie’s mom had been trying to sell their house with the intent of moving to New York. None of the Losers wanted to say why, but her decision came quickly after Eddie missed grabbing one of the many college mailers for the out-of-state schools he had been accepted into, and she had been suspiciously quiet on the matter. It didn’t surprise the group that Sonia Kaspbrak took it upon herself to move with her son when he went to college, but the decision to leave Derry so soon was seen almost as a punishment for Eddie daring to attempt an escape. The summer was split between trying to think of ways to keep Eddie from leaving and doing their best to ignore the inevitable. By the time the first week of school rolled around, the Kaspbrak’s yard had a ‘Sold’ sign planted in the grass. Eddie had divvied up various items like he was preparing for hospice, giving his friends photos and mementos to remember him by. He promised to write them and call whenever he could, and the boys returned the sentiments, but they all knew that none of that would happen. After Beverly and Ben left, they never heard from the pair again. Not even once._

_After they watched the moving truck pull away, the remaining four did their best to move on, just as they had before. They went to the arcade, they studied for midterms, they watched movies. Everything continued without the pitched voice of reason and scolding that they had all held so dear._

_When the day of the dance rolled around, Bill had gone with Katie Matthews, promising to meet up with Stan and Richie when he got there. His mom had taken the traditional pre-homecoming photos in their front yard and his dad had even given him some money to take her to dinner afterwards. They’d both forced smiles and promised they would be back by curfew before Katie drove them the short distance to Derry High School._

_He supposed he lost track of time during the evening. As soon as they arrived, Katie introduced him to her many friends, even though they had all gone to school together since they were kids. She had him get all of them punch and they danced through pretty much every song that played. His feet ached something terrible when he finally looked at his watch and realized he’d been there for almost three hours and still hadn’t seen Richie or Stan. Excusing himself, he made some laps of the gym. Failing to find them inside, he exited the building and came upon the image that had interrupted his thoughts in the first place._

_In the weeks after Eddie’s departure, Richie had shown no indication that he even cared. He continued to joke like he always did, make nasty comments that had everyone swatting at him and rolling their eyes. He even teased Bill about blowing their plan to go stag and to make sure to wear a condom, so he didn’t end up with a “b-b-bouncing b-baby b-b-boy” after graduation. But Bill supposed he should have known it was all bullshit. They loved Mike, Beverly, and Ben – obviously – but he, Richie, Stan, and Eddie had known each other since they were learning to tie their shoes. They’d been there for each other through everything, not just It, but their whole lives so far. And now a big piece of that was gone._

_They were pressed up against the back wall of the gymnasium, alone sans for a couple making out several yards away. Even with his face pressed into Stan’s lap, Richie’s sobs echoed across the empty blacktop. Stan was carding his fingers through Richie’s hair, his own eyes wet and vacant. He glanced up to meet Bill’s gaze and when he started to open his mouth, he replied with the slightest shake of his head. Bill closed his lips and took a seat beside them, placing Richie in the middle. After a moment of discomfort, he ran his hand up and down Richie’s back. The cries seemed to go on for hours, but by the fact that Katie never came out to look for him, Bill had to assume it was only a couple minutes. Richie eventually sat up, scrubbing roughly at his face with his sleeves. Without a word, he dug through his pockets and retrieved a carton of cigarettes, offering the box to each of them. They sat in silence for a while, watching the smoke fade into the night sky before Richie finally asked, in one of his Voices, if Mrs. Uris was interested in opening up her marriage since his beloved Sonia had left. Stan, not even batting an eye, simply told Richie that he would need to start showing up for synagogue because his mom was only interested in nice Jewish boys. They all immediately erupted into laughter and it was as if the tears had never happened._

“Billy Boy?”

“Huh?” He hadn’t even realized he’d stopped speaking. The image of an eighteen-year-old Richie, covered with snot and remnants of pubescent acne was replaced with the forty-year-old that sat before him, raising an eyebrow in apparent confusion.

“Figured you went off into your writing process or some shit.” Richie explained, “Not that I mind. I got to order some shrimp toast to go without judgement.” He patted the Styrofoam container in front of him that Bill had totally missed. “But your phone’s been going nuts.”

“Oh.” Bill shook his head, willing the memory away for the moment in order to check his notifications. Alison texted, asking where he was and if he had updated the second act. “Shit, I’ve gotta get back.” He had done as she’d asked, but he had a feeling rewrites would be necessary.

For once, Richie didn’t comment, and instead followed Bill back out of the restaurant. The drive back was just as nauseating as their departure had been and when Richie dropped Bill in front of his trailer, he made sure to express said feelings. They were waved away and Bill found himself laughing too. He couldn’t remember the last time he enjoyed lunch with a friend. Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he had had basic fun in L.A. No release parties, no red-carpet events with Audra. Just… lunch. Fucking around with someone. Richie assured Bill that he would text him to about future plans before speeding off. And as he watched his car merge dangerously back onto the main road, a Queen song blasting, Bill was comfortable in the knowledge that the statement would be true this time.

******

_“Even though you tell me you love me, I’m afraid you just love a disguise.”_

-Janelle Monae, “Don’t Judge Me”

******

_“Jesus Christ, Stanley. You getting ready to lead the Jews out of Egypt with all this shit?”_

_“Suck my circumcised dick.”_

_Richie dropped the family sized bottle of suntan lotion back into his friend’s bike basket, his attention diverted to reaching across the handlebars to put Stan in a headlock. “Ooooh, Stan the Man gets off a good one!”_

_Stan squirmed and did his best to keep his bike upright while wiggling out of the grasp. Once he was free, he made a point to swipe at Richie’s heels when nudging out his kickstand. Richie’s smile stayed in place._

_It was one month before the start of their freshman year. Parents were still a week away from dragging their kids out to buy school clothes and most of the Losers were still a while away from panicking about over-the-summer assignments that they yet to complete. Life was good. The statement was further punctuated by Stan’s corralling the group to spend the day at the quarry. Even the usual complaints of heat and sunburn were only half-hearted, everyone too tempted by the new pack of batteries Richie had purchased for his boombox and the unspoken promise for a midday ice cream break. They all agreed to meet up, with Richie and Stan being the first to get there. They barely had a chance to throw off their t-shirts before dirt was kicked up, signaling more arrivals. Everyone settled in a shady spot by the edge of the water, pleased that none of their peers found the joy in the quarry that they did and left them to their devices. Mike and Bill spent the day talking about the “Necroscope” trilogy and drawing in the sand. Ben and Beverly kept trying to see who could hold their breath longer underwater or could do a better handstand. Stan, Eddie, and Richie dedicated hours to attempting to stack themselves on one another’s shoulders, insistent that doing so would allow them to finally beat the powerhouse chicken fight team that was Mike and Ben. When the sun climbed to the top of the sky, a quick game of “not it” decided who would go to pick up ice cream while the others remained with their camp. Richie, Beverly, and Stan resolved to go, throwing sandy t-shirts over damp bodies and pedaling back to town. Only after Beverly and Stan’s bike baskets were filled with popsicles and ice cream sandwiches did the former broach the topic._

_“I’ve never been night swimming before.”_

_Richie turned to look at her as he pedaled. She had gripped the center of the handlebars with one hand, the other holding the Orange Super Split she was going to town on. Her bike stayed steady. Beverly Marsh was a superhero._

_“No need. Just watch that first part in “Jaws” and you’ll know all about it.” He laughed._

_Beverly rolled her eyes. “You don’t actually think there are sharks in the quarry, do you?”_

_Richie didn’t provide his honest answer. That, yeah, maybe there were. Why wouldn’t there be? They hadn’t thought there was a fucking clown that ate kids in the sewers, and It had been there, right? Instead he said no, but there were probably leeches or something and he wasn’t interested in anything that sucked like that unless it sucked dick, to which Beverly responded by pedaling close enough to him that he almost swerved and smashed into a tree. They were oblivious to Stan being so far ahead of them, only pausing when they saw him pull off before the hill that would take them down to the bottom of the quarry. They parked their bikes just in time to see Stan throw his t-shirt into his basket and with a single cry, he cannonballed over the edge of the quarry, the same place they had all taken a dive from the summer before. His scream of joy was punctuated with a muted splash below and after a moment, they saw him bob to the surface and wave. Even from so high up, Richie could see that his smile – one that was so often reserved and brief – was wide enough to show all his teeth. He didn’t even take a second to think and followed suit, flinging himself into the water with Beverly right behind._

_By the time they got back to the top to walk their bikes down again, most of ice cream had melted through the wrappers. Richie had laughed when he saw Stan groan at the sight of his t-shirt covered in a rainbow of flavors. The remains of a Rocket Pop coated his friend’s skin and for just a second, the cherry syrup painted his hands in a way that was uncomfortably familiar—_

A car horn blasted Richie from his daze. He looked up past his sun visor, realizing the light had turned green and by the sound of the repeated honks, it’d turned green some time ago. Sticking his arm out the window to wave an apology, he hit the gas. Upon returning to his apartment, he tossed his leftovers into the fridge and began to wander about the space. For once, his memory hadn’t disappeared as soon as he stopped thinking about it, as they tended to do. Hell, even after his return to Derry, he could easily blow off uncomfortable calls back to his childhood. Blame it on the A.D.D., baby. Wasn’t that what Imagine Dragons said?

But the image of Stan, barely fourteen years old… Grinning up at him like nothing fucking mattered, like he wasn’t just a few weeks away from head gear, a few years from being given an awful sex talk on the third night of Hanukkah, and two and a half decades from trying to fucking kill himself…

“Stanley Uris speaking.”

“Shit—!” Richie nearly jumped out of his skin, dropping his phone to the floor. Picking it back up, he brought the device back to his ear. He didn’t even remember calling him. “We all have caller ID, dude. Don’t have to announce yourself when you pick up.” Nonetheless, he slid into an easy tone.

“Hello, Richie. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

A smile tugged at Richie’s lips. He sounded the fucking same. “Just thought I’d give you a call. Do a check-in.” He slipped into a Voice, a WASP-like nasal that he had been playing with despite his internal insistence that it would never see the spotlight. Too campy. “Can’t I ask how my little Manly Stanley is doing?”

“You can. But that doesn’t mean I can’t fear an ulterior motive. You didn’t mail me sneezing powder or something, did you?”

Richie snorted out a laugh. “Nah, not yet… hey, do you remember that time you dove into the quarry by yourself?” When he didn’t get an answer, he went on. “We’d all gone to the quarry together and you, me, and Bev went to get ice cream and we were heading back—”

“Yeah, now that you mention it. Shit, I haven’t thought of that since… I’m not sure since when. If you hadn’t reminded me, I would have said it sounded like something stupid you would do.”

“Give me some credit. If it was me, I would have owned up to it.”

“That’s true.” Richie could hear some muffled noise on Stan’s end. “Patty says hi.”

Patty. Stan’s wife. Mrs. Urine herself (though he suspected such a joke wouldn’t be appreciated). A woman apparently funnier than all of them combined and the only one that really knew their beloved friend post-Derry. Richie still hadn’t met her. “Tell her hi back.”

He heard Stan pass on his message. There was a soft response and then Stan was giggling in his ear. Richie didn’t remember him ever sounding like that.

“You better not be giving her the wrong impression of me when I can’t defend myself.”

“She said to tell you she likes your comedy. That you’re remind her of Dane Cook, but less funny.”

“Oh fuck you!” Richie grinned, hearing a woman’s laughter loud and clear through his phone speaker. Mrs. Uris gets off a good one. “Christ, now I know who to call when I need my ego checked.”

“Yeah, your head’s big enough as it is. How are you, Rich?”

The pair fell into painless chit-chat. Pacing about his apartment, he allowed Stan to tell him about the neighborhood block party he helped organize and the home renovation projects Patty had started on. He asked how the other Losers were doing, having not heard from Bill and Mike since they’d dropped them off at the airport. Richie launched into a retelling of his trip to New York (with a few addendums) and filled him in on various conversations he’d been having with Eddie, including their most recent debate.

“And then the asshole really had the audacity to say that he got why _Spotlight _got nominated for so heavily in the Academy Awards when he hadn’t even seen _Ex Machina_. Are you joking!? Alicia Vikander was fucking robbed.” He huffed, shaking his head. “What a prick.”

Stan laughed hard on the other end. Richie prepared to make a joke about his laugh sounding exactly as it did pre-puberty, only to go quiet as Stan spoke. “God, nothing’s changed.”

“I know. He’s always been such a dick to me for no reason! I deserve no such treatment.”

“You two are always at each other’s throats. It’s basically the only way you know how to say ‘I love you’.”

“Well, I always tried to get Eds to accept me for my stepdad potential when we were kids, but he always had an issue with the age difference.” Fuck, could Stan hear his heartbeat?

“C’mon, man. Sonia wasn’t the Kaspbrak you were after and none of us ever met Eddie’s dad.”

Richie nearly dropped his phone. Swiping his sweaty palms against his jeans, he held the device between his ear and his shoulder.

“What did you say?”

“You heard me.” Stan teased. Richie didn’t answer. After a few seconds of tense silence, the former coughed, apparently picking up on his error. “Look, I didn’t mean anything bad by it, Rich. I just meant… well, when Bill told me you were the one to stay back in Derry, I thought you two had finally talked about—”

“Talked about what?” Richie snapped, “Talking about _nothing_, because there’s nothing to talk about!”

“It’s not a big deal—”

“What isn’t?” He wasn’t going to give Stan a chance to answer, to say some shit about how he’d “always suspected” or “knew since they were kids” or some other bullshit. “I’m not gay and if I was, I wouldn’t be gunning to bone a guy barely taller than a fifth grader that prides himself on knowing what sheets have the best thread count.”  
  


“Richie, I wasn’t trying to start anything.”

“Give Patty my best.” He ended the call. Christ, he missed flip phones. There was something so dramatic about clapping your screen shut that he needed right then. Instead he threw the phone onto the hardwood of his kitchen.

“Fuck!”

What the hell was Stan playing at? Like he knew jack shit about any of this. He hadn’t been there for anything. He didn’t know. He hadn’t seen Derry or been there when It came for them again. He didn’t know about the arcade or Connor or about the long fucking nights he spent wishing, begging, praying that this shit would go away. That he wouldn’t keep feeling like he’d been punched in the stomach every time Eddie would communicate a silent message to him just by looking him in the eyes, wouldn’t keep hiding the notes they exchanged in class like porn mags under his bed, wouldn’t fight with him about that stupid hammock because he knew they would just end up sharing. Stan didn’t know that there was a fucking bridge in Maine that Richie would have been thrown from if people like Bowers knew what he was carving into the side of it.

But what difference did any of that make? He’d told Eddie the truth and nothing happened. No anger, no hate—

_No reciprocation. No love. No hope._

And that was the end of it. One could settle for friendship. Wouldn’t he rather have that tiny, Whole Foods obsessed asshole in his life as a friend than not have him at all?

Sighing and rubbing at his temples, Richie bent to pick up his phone. A fresh crack split the screen and he could almost hear a flurry of comments from his friends about his lack of impulse control.

_Mr. Stanley Urine: Richie please answer me  
_ _3 more notifications_

He swiped the texts away. There was more important shit to deal with right then, like a liquor cabinet and some slightly chilled shrimp toast.

Richie didn’t remember exactly how he arrived at the decision. Only that first, he was choosing between a starter of scotch or gin, and next thing he knew, he was sitting in the dark, his empty take-out box on the floor, and his eyes locked on the television. Dustin Hoffman was running as fast as he could into a New Age-y church and was devastated to see that he was seemingly too late to stop Katharine Ross from getting married.

“Beeeeen!” She cried up at him from the aisle, prompting the man to race down to meet her. Richie rolled his eyes, downing the rest of his glass.

“She sounds like a fuckin’ horror movie…” He muttered. His eyes drifted towards his phone again. He’d lost count of how many times he caught himself doing that, his fingers twitching to text Eddie his thoughts. He refocused, coming back in time to see Hoffman and Ross fighting off angry guests before barring them inside with a huge ass crucifix. They were smiling and laughing, obvious to the shouts behind them. Grabbing each other’s hands, they ran from the church and Moss’ family and the anger that threatened them—

Richie’s eyes were back on the phone. The screen was blank, cleared of all notifications. No voices or messages to contradict or distract him.

Who was it that said, “I want everything I’ve ever seen in the movies”?

Clumsily unlocking his phone, he accessed Expedia and expressed appreciation aloud that he didn’t fear potential hackers stealing his credit card information. With just a couple clicks, he was ready to fly to New York that coming weekend. He dropped his phone to the floor as soon as he finished and was asleep before he even received a flight confirmation e-mail. On screen, Hoffman and Moss clamored to the back of a bus. As they caught their breath, Disturbed’s “The Sound of Silence” began to play and reality sank in.

What the fuck had they done?


End file.
